12.19.07 EXCLUSIVE! THE ALLAN WEISBECKER INTERVIEW
Update: Allan has promised a free Zen and Zero DVD to anyone who forwards this interview to twenty friends - just CC promogroup@banditobooks.com on the emails and add your mailing address (US only - sorry foreigners).
This is part one of my interview with Allan Weisbecker - surfer, author, screenwriter, and former drug smuggler - a man who physically threatened John Cusack and to whom Sean Penn once wrote “I encourage you to stay (in Central America) until something that resembles death.”
He’s the author of Cosmic Banditos, perhaps soon to be a major motion picture starring John Cusack; In Search of Captain Zero, perhaps soon to be a major motion picture starring Sean Penn; and Can’t You Get Along With Anyone: Writer’s Memoir and a Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise, of which I’ll be publishing excerpts here. He’s got plenty to say, much of it supporting FilmDrunk’s suspicions about Hollywood producers vís a vís their intelligence level. Here’s a snip:
“One assignment I turned down was based on a studio executive’s idea that a great white shark befriends a young boy. The great white is severely misunderstood; in the end the boy saves his buddy from the evil shark hunters. Sort of a cold-blooded Free Willy. The exec’s solution to the problem of how to make this believable was the following: ‘We just have to make the shark… you know… fuzzy…’”
To put it in Hollywood shorthand, Allan Weisbecker’s life story is like The Endless Summer meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Blow meets The Player. The best part about it is that he’s survived to tell the tale (barely), and tell a tale he can.
It took years of working in Hollywood and a critically acclaimed novel (a hilarious farce about the intersection of outlaws, quantum physics, and tequila), Cosmic Banditos, before Weisbecker wised up and realized that, even without making anything up, he was his own best character. Ten years ago, he sold everything he owned to drive to Central America (surfing along the way, of course) in search of an old friend who’d disappeared years earlier, his last correspondence a cryptic postcard signed, “Captain Zero.” What followed was a harrowing journey into the heart of darkness, a memoir full of swashbuckling tales of drug-running and thumbing his nose at polite society (and the consequences thereof) called In Search of Captain Zero.
In 2006, he wrote another another memoir (after its first run in the U.K. was suspended due to legal troubles, Weisbecker created his own publishing company and re-released it in August 2007), Can’t You Get Along With Anyone: Writer’s Memoir and a Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise. In it, he relates the characters he deals with in the film and publishing business (who turn out to be more duplicitous than any in the drug world), the real-life thugs and murderers that have invaded his piece of paradise past the end of the road in Costa Rica, his own love problems, and the sorry state of dishonesty and denial in the world today that ties them all together. His pain is our gain when he’s pursued on all sides by lawyers, Hollywood morons, sociopaths and assorted snakes before finally writing the book that almost killed him thrice. 
I emailed him out of the blue one day, and aside from proving how accessible he is to fans, the conversation that followed provided further insight into a man who’s always chasing what Hunter S. Thompson called “that maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.”
READ ON FOR PART I: WELCOME TO HOLLYWOOD
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There are 49 comments about:
EXCLUSIVE! THE ALLAN WEISBECKER INTERVIEW
Look! Steel wool in that weed!!!
In an odd twist of fate I commented on this thread earlier when it was dated from june and now I see that I have no voice here anymore. Can you guys still hear me out there? Hello?
OK, since there is a huge bag of marijuana in this thread, I feel compelled to tell this story:
One night my brother and I were getting blazed, adn we wondered what a bag would look like if it had all of the weed we had ever smoked in it (imagine a Hefty Lawn Bag bulging at the seams).
Then we thought to ourselves, wouldn’t it be cool if we could have that bag and smoke it! But then, if we smoked it, it would be added to all of the weed we ever smoked, so it would magically and eternally replenish itself because the bag has everything we ever smoked, and whatever you smoke out of it is added to the bag!
At first glance, that surfing picture looks like a crocodile eating something.
At first glance, I look like Ron Howard in his early thirties.
Coincidence? I think not.
Are they smuggling antiquities in that bale of weed? Look in the lower left corner of the main pic.
woah!!! is that a giant box of marlboros they’re smuggling i n the banner pic!!!!
reddit and dugg
EXCLUSIVE! WHERE’S COTW????
You dirty SOB. Don’t make me come over there.
(and if that was a legitimate question, COW will be up tomorrow before noon.)
Okay. Thanks for the response. I’ll go finish my essay so that I can be a productive member of society (if only someone could tell me how to be a productive member of society with a creative writing degree. Hold on to your stereo systems. I gotsta eat)
Does writing a movie blog count as a productive member of society? No? Oh, hehe, well, right, I suppose it doesn’t… Hee hee, member.
I’m already hooked from the FD interview and have purchased all three books today. Turn down the lights and pour the scotch, daddy’s got some readin’ to do this weekend!
And if you’re all wondering where I’ve been…well frankly…that is none of your damn business and I thank you to stay out of my personal affairs. Don’t worry though, I’m always watching over you kids and reading up on the latest Drunkard H-wood gossip, just not commenting cause I just don’t feel too damn funny these days.
Are we going to be tested on this?
lance, i hope that you yourself have upmodded (reddit) this and dugg it (digg)
That banner picture’s going in my spank bank.
sure, I get back from work and you’ve posted a bagillion things! It’s like all the presents for hanakuh on one night… I guess you’re leaving the socks and eye-glasses kit for tomorrow?
this is just like ray hee hayn on yur wayding dee. A free roid ween yur allraydee late. Goood advice thayt you jest deedint take. And hoo woodive thawt it figgered. eez int eet aye ranic? don’t ya think?
gooey… that avatar makes me gag…. is that how you want women to react to you?
That’s an old picture of me. I should probably update it with the new one where you can’t see my eyes.
Sloppy milk drinkers are people too.
I’ve never seen milk that thick and sticky.
Oh no. thats cum on my face. I was just saying "sloppy milk drinkers are people too" because i was just trying to promote a civil rights organization i’m a part of on a completely unrelated note.
On no, not you Louie. I was looking in my fridge, and there was some 6 month old milk in there. I put it back in, because I figure it’s almost cheese. It’s one less thing for me to pick up at the supermarket.
oh yes and I was referring to the fact that it looked like old milk that my sister once dared me to drink… it wasn’t supposed to be taken in a sexual context at all…
………………..
yeah
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