ON THE MAKING OF . . .

How This Came About

I started with a box of materials that was (literally) falling apart, given to me by Mrs. Cornell in late 1993. I knew her because I too lived in Yuba City for a time, during my high school years. I knew Stephen, Michael Willetts, and most of the others who are written about in Stephen's manuscript. (My graduation photo included on the Photo Table of Contents page is my one memento included here.) Happily for myself, I left Yuba City shortly after graduation, and have only returned since for a single high school reunion. While I was tempted to return in the past year to gather additional material to be included here, I must say my dislike of the place is still strong enough to keep me from that. Everything here was collected by Stephen.

At the time Mrs. Cornell called me last year, I was deeply involved in other activities, mainly my UCLA teaching and also working on a project using materials from the Alfred Hitchcock Special Collection at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Library. Mrs. Cornell is a very sweet, touching, and persuasive woman, and when she told me the story of Stephen's depressing last years, it really struck a responsive chord in me. I have lived in Los Angeles since the early Seventies, and it seems like my memories of time here are filled with people like Stephen. Everybody has a script, a book, a dream to sell, and for every Paul Schrader (one of my best friends when I was in graduate school) there are hundreds of Stephen Cornell's - people who wind up on the waste-heap through no faults other than a lack of commercial sense, over-ambitious artistic sensibilities, and a self-defeating state of mind.

While Stephen did, according to his mother, find the occasional powerful person to champion his manuscript, he was never able to parlay that support into anything real. The Foreword to his manuscript (which I have left intact) suggests the depth of feeling of some of that support, but that was more than overbalanced by the reactions from publishers, which range from the quizzical to the outright hostile. Rejection apparently drove Stephen to alcohol, if he hadn't been in its embrace already, and his last years find him ever more depressed and dishevelled, holding onto (barely) his welfare office job, and watching his work get less and less attention. Perhaps he should have gone on to either rewrite the original or try something else, but Instrument of War became an obsession that consumed his plans and finally did him in, engulfed like his subject in a no-win no-escape situation.

If one emotion drove me to this project it is probably guilt - on so many levels I can barely untangle. First because Stephen used to call me every now and then, and either suggest we get together or just to talk on the phone. By a certain point I would just blow him off, thinking that his hangdog manner and tales of woe would somehow infect me. Never did I dream that he had a far greater contribution to make than I, and that someday, if we are not all lost to the oblivion of time, I will be proud to be known only for my efforts to keep his work alive. I feel guilt too of a sort he comes close to articulating a number of times, and that seems to me to bubble close to the surface often - that the intense feelings we might have had during this period never really translated into a significant contribution. Big events were happening around us, but we were too far away and too detached, bystanders to bystanders. The admiration Stephen expresses for Michael Willetts, at the times Stephen thinks (or first realizes) that Michael really might be responsible for all these killings, that same admiration I feel at a second remove toward Stephen. At least he went back to collect this material and tried to do something with it to keep the event and the times alive. All I did was avoid his phone calls.

So my efforts here are the smallest of penances for these feelings, for the people I should have done something more for and a time I should have been more involved in. Hopefully we all have the capacity to change, and while I see myself throughout the time and places covered here, I would like to think I am not the person now I was then, and that in some ways I carry on from people I should have appreciated and learned from better than I did.

This is supposed to be a "making of" section, so I better say something of the physical condition of the materials which Stephen left. The manuscript was in fairly good condition, the very one left for me only one of a boxful that Mrs. Cornell said she had. This one was in a manila folder labeled "St. Martin's Press", one of the many returned to Stephen. Mrs. Cornell said that Stephen had a weird superstition which prevented him from sending out the same copy of a rejected manuscript a second time. Whenever one came back, he dutifully recorded the date on a yellow sheet of ledger paper and placed it in his closet. She said his closet was full of the paraphernalia of the would-be writer - a nearly-worn-out three-hole punch, a bunch of paper fasteners, and some red folder covers. He would apparently xerox a new copy each time he wanted to submit it, and put together a fresh submission each time.

I don't think the tapes and clippings he left were meant to be part of his "research." He probably just happened to hold onto a few things. I am likely as frustrated as you that the materials are not more extensive (and that copyright prevented me from using more than the fragments that I did), but I assure you I have looked these materials over closely and tried to be true to their contents in my re-creation. I think Stephen was probably imagining a litttle "photo insert" section in a conventional hardcover book, not what has happened here. If I am ever able to work on this further, I will obviously have to fill in the supporting documentation with many more clippings, photos, videos, and the like.

Of the few people who have so far seen this work (I am writing in October 1997), a good number have asked me for more details of the circumstances of Stephen's suicide. I will tell what little I heard from Mrs. Cornell, though it pained me greatly to ask her. He left no note, and I have only her to rely on for this. She said that he killed himself with a shot to the temple, using a small handgun that was later classified a military weapon. It could be said perhaps that Michael Willetts' obessions in some ways had carried over to Stephen. I think it could happen to any of us. Michael, Stephen, and I are perhaps closer than we realized.

Lastly, I wish to thank Dr. Michael McCoy, now retired from the UCLA Medical School for being the first to really get me started with serious computer things and to make me see their humanistic and educational potential, and Dr. Gerri Sinclair for happy and productive years of collaboration and conversation.