I’d spent most of the day tucked away at the Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, working through a pile of notes. Its high-backed, padded red leather booths were the perfect hiding spot for harried writers trying to clobber their way through script changes and, boy, did I have script changes.

Some folks called Max Niemann a bully and others called him a genius. I called him an obsessive workaholic. I was laboring on yet another draft of The Seventh Veil of Salome, and I was the third writer that Niemann had hired. His propensity for new notes was enough to send any scribe howling out the door, but I didn’t mind him. Previously, I’d done work for other directors of note: Howard Hawks, who liked to mutter disparaging comments about Jews, and I’d had to stomach Michael Curtiz’s creative barrage of hyphenated insults—no-good-son-of-a-bitch—ad nauseam. Niemann didn’t think highly enough of writers to abuse them, reserving his barbs for his actors and assistants, so I was in a relatively serene state of mind.

After a couple of whiskey sours and a plate of grilled lamb kidneys, I tucked my portable Smith-Corona Sterling into its case and headed back to the studio to deliver the pages Niemann had been asking about. Pacific Pictures was a midsize player. The gorillas in the business were MGM, Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. The crown jewels of Hollywood. Then you had RKO, Universal, Columbia, and of course Pacific Pictures. We were not providers of Poverty Row fare, like Grand National, but we didn’t have MGM’s dazzling facilities, either. We made a heck of a lot of mindless comedies, our share of corny romances and dramas, and a couple of big-budget opuses each year. Just as you’d expect, like clockwork.

Things were changing, though, in more than one way, around town. The antitrust case against the majors dealt a blow to the mega studios, and TV was picking up speed and viewers. Charlie Chaplin sold his studio at La Brea after being declared persona non grata in the US, and a bunch of writers decamped to Mexico for fear of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I’d stayed put. HUAC had lots of us spooked, but I needed the work, and work meant living in Hollywood.

So, nu, anyway, that’s not what your documentary is about, I know. Salome, let’s talk about her.