Sudden Fame Is Frustrating for Writer Behind Tapes : Career: Fuhrman’s views shocked McKinny, but she doggedly pursued script. Despite notoriety, it’s still unsold.

The ugly words shocked and repulsed her. But Laura Hart McKinny listened all the same.

She wanted the story. Detective Mark Fuhrman had it.

So she listened. He talked. And the tapes recorded. Spinning and spinning, they captured Fuhrman’s racist slurs and brutal boasts. They recorded McKinny’s cautious questions. And then they vaulted smack into the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

Now jurors will hear a few snippets from those famous tapes. And McKinny will be called upon to explain them. A soft-spoken professor known as the mothering type, a driven researcher who once slept in a cardboard box to better write about a homeless character, McKinny will be asked to testify that Fuhrman repeatedly slurred African Americans with the word “nigger.”

The long-running tape furor has pushed McKinny tantalizingly close to the big bucks of Hollywood. It’s a glitzy, high-rolling world she and her husband have long struggled to enter.

But she has found this experience more frustrating than fantastic.

Just two years after a financial crisis that forced her to declare personal bankruptcy, McKinny holds much-sought-after assets: tapes that politicians are desperate to hear, a transcript folks are begging to read, and a well-hyped screenplay that sprang from the Fuhrman tapes. So far, however, she has been unable or unwilling to earn a dime from that material.

Eager to pin a price tag on the tapes, her lawyer contacted a few tabloids in early July--about two weeks before the Fuhrman interviews exploded into the Simpson spotlight. “We were duty-bound as attorneys to advise her of the value,” attorney Ron Regwan said.

Now, however, McKinny insists the tapes are not for sale.

At least, not now, her lawyer hastens to add.

*

McKinny would much prefer to peddle “Men Against Women,” her 120-page screenplay based on the Fuhrman tapes. She wouldn’t mind selling her novel by the same name either, even though she’s not quite done with the second draft.

A screenwriting professor who has never sold a major script, McKinny, 44, longs to turn her decade of laborious research into a Hollywood blockbuster. According to her husband, Daniel, she has watched with frustration as her copyrighted tapes leaked into the press and blared from the courthouse--diminishing the shock value and perhaps the commercial appeal of “Men Against Women.”

“She has done a lot of journalism to reveal [racism and sexism] at the LAPD, and she thinks it’s important for the public to hear about it, but she wants to be the one to tell them,” Daniel McKinny said. “She did all the work.”

Despite the financial trouble two years ago, when Laura McKinny declared bankruptcy after toting up $80,000 in credit card debt and unpaid taxes, Daniel McKinny said the couple feel no pressure to sell the stack of Fuhrman audiotapes.

A cinematographer who toiled for years as a grip on movie sets, Daniel McKinny said the two ran up the debts during a period when neither had a full-time job. Laura McKinny was tutoring UCLA athletes at the time--earning praise as a teacher but working just part-time.

The couple, who have two sons, left their Santa Monica home after the 1993 bankruptcy filing to take up posts as professors at the North Carolina School of the Arts. “It’s the first time in our lives we’ve had steady paychecks,” Daniel McKinny said.

“If this happened two years ago [money] would probably be an issue,” he added. “But fortunately, we’re not in that situation now. We really aren’t financially strapped. So we have no pressure to sell those tapes and transcripts if we don’t want to.”

Still, their lawyer recently tried to sell the transcripts to Dove Books for $500,000, publisher Michael Viner said. Viner, who has published several books related to the Simpson trial, turned them down, explaining: “It didn’t even pass the smell test as being anything close to literature.”

The transcripts may not have rated as fine literature. But McKinny labored for a decade to turn her raw material into a screenplay.

The result: “Men Against Women,” a story of a rookie female police officer who falls in love with her patrol partner--a man who just happens to belong to a club of racist, sexist and all-around nasty cops.

McKinny had just started working on the screenplay back in 1985 when she met Fuhrman at Alice’s Restaurant in Westwood. She was typing on a laptop computer; curious about the machine, he approached her and started chatting. Once he learned she was working on a script about cops, Fuhrman volunteered to help out.

*

And McKinny found him an excellent source. After promising to pay him $10,000 if she sold the script to a movie-maker, she called on Fuhrman for at least a dozen interviews. She also tagged along with other officers on patrol. Her extensive research, students say, was typical of her writing style.

“She always told us, ‘How are you going to write about someone unless you live their life?’ ” said one of her North Carolina students, junior Harbor Peoples.

Another student, Michael Patwin Jr., said McKinny advised everyone to be persistent when interviewing: “When you establish a source, the more you go back, the more you can learn,” he said she told them. McKinny also taught her students to listen to sources unobtrusively, no matter what they said, Patwin recalled: “You don’t want to edit or cut [sources] off--you want them to go and go and go and go.”

Eager to keep Fuhrman talking, McKinny did not challenge even his most repugnant views. But inside, she bristled--and, as a fairly liberal women’s rights advocate, expressed disgust to friends.

“She certainly made it clear that she was appalled at the Men Against Women [group],” one friend said.

Convinced that the world should know what a Los Angeles cop could say and do, Laura McKinny “talked a lot about the best way to get this story in front of the public,” Daniel McKinny said. Her conclusion: tell the shocking tales with movies.

Some analysts have criticized Laura McKinny for that decision. Given Fuhrman’s sensational stories of police misconduct, and the specific details he provided, defense attorney Gigi Gordon said she believes McKinny should have set aside her screenplay ambitions and turned over the tapes to authorities.

“She’s a woman who heard the war stories of a racist, abusive police officer and did nothing about it,” Gordon said. “Why didn’t she come forward with the tapes? . . . She’s no better than all the people in LAPD who heard him use the word, knew about the things he did and stood by and remained silent.”

Even when she realized her tapes could be relevant to the Simpson trial, McKinny decided to hold on to the material. She told her stepson last Christmas that she had been interviewing Fuhrman. But she warned him not to blab.

“They told me not to say anything,” 14-year-old Ryan McKinny said. “My dad told me he didn’t want to pay money to hire a lawyer, and he didn’t want reporters knocking on his door.”

In an appearance on “Prime Time Live,” Laura McKinny explained that she never considered handing lawyers the material because “there’s nothing on the tapes that directly exonerates Mr. Simpson.” Her husband added in an interview that they decided the tapes “didn’t directly relate” to the case--even though they clearly impeached Fuhrman’s testimony that he had not used the word “nigger” in a decade.

Calling his wife’s position “a moral dilemma,” Daniel McKinny said they both believe “there’s a lot of evidence O.J. Simpson did these terrible things.” To their dismay, the tapes boost Simpson’s defense.

Fighting to keep the tapes private, the McKinnys’ lawyers, Ron Regwan and Matthew Schwartz, met secretly in Judge Lance A. Ito’s chambers to discuss the matter. But it was clear both the prosecution and the defense would subpoena the tapes.

Shortly after that meeting--before the tapes hit the press--Regwan said he called “just a couple” of tabloids to see how much money his clients’ research might fetch. “We were duty bound as attorneys to advise her of the value,” Regwan said. “Anything less than that would be malpractice.”

*

Now that the most stunning snippets of the tapes have been played in open court, their price is bound to plunge. McKinny’s script, which attracted few bids before the furor, may also lose value, said Sam Grogg, dean of the school of filmmaking where McKinny teaches.

“She was nervous that the value of her screenplay might be diminished because it was so controversial,” Grogg said. McKinny never told him she wanted to earn money off the raw transcripts, he said. “I’ve never heard her say, ‘This is where I cash in.’ ”

Times staff writer Henry Weinstein contributed to this story.