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May-June 2008
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< previous | 1 | 2 In 1978, he moved to the Mount Baldy Zen Center, located 8,000 feet above sea level on Mount San Antonio in the San Gabriel Mountains outside Los Angeles. “It was as rigorous as you could get in the United States, like a nineteenth-century monastery, a real boot camp,” he recalls. “But I’m a writer, I’m used to austere conditions.” And he never stopped writing; in L.A., he edited the Buddhist journal Zero. One afternoon, after meeting a prospective contributor, Lerner bumped into a high-school friend, Linda Obst, who had become a Hollywood producer. “I discovered that I was in possession of the key piece of currency for a Hollywood screenwriter: the ability to quickly imagine a full-blown story with a beginning, middle, and end,” he says. “I went to Southern California to live in a Zen monastery and stayed to write screenplays.” By 1983, Lerner had begun a career as a screenwriter that kept him continuously employed for the next two decades. His biggest hit was the 1990 romantic comedy Bird on a Wire, starring Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson. Yet, as Lerner notes, “I spent the next decade trying to explain to people what I wrote, and what was dumped on top of what I wrote. Maybe my time in the monastery helped me develop the cast-iron stomach to deal with working conditions in Hollywood. Walking barefoot through snow at three in the morning was nothing compared to a story meeting at Paramount.” Today, Lerner says he’s quite content with the semi-solitary working routine of “an old-fashioned novelist.” At his Boston home, he starts writing each day at 5 a.m. The voice of his second novel is that of Livia, wife of Augustus Caesar, who seeks after 2,000 years to clear her name of the charges—from Tacitus to Robert Graves—that she was a scheming poisoner. “I’ve finally embarked on the life in fiction I was looking for at age 19,” he says, “when I walked into a bookstore on Mount Auburn Street and bought my copy of Ulysses.”  
 
 
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