This Reward Wasn’t in the Script

Quite a chasm, I suggest to Anna Waterhouse, between teaching English comp at Orange Coast College and rubbing elbows with the Hollywood elite as a script doctor.

All modesty aside, she is forced to agree. In Hollywood circles, she’s been in the homes of people who have private jets (Tom Cruise’s producing partner). At Orange Coast, well, there’s faculty parking.

She knows of showbiz people who not only have their own home theater, they have their own projectionist.

But in the classic Hollywood fashion, we will have a surprise ending to her story.

First, the juicy stuff. And, yes, we’ll do more name-dropping.

As you probably know, script doctors don’t save lives, they save scripts. Not all by themselves, of course, and Waterhouse makes no such claim. But their role -- often uncredited because of various Hollywood customs or paranoia -- is to repair scripts that directors or producers deem unfit for human viewing. And, as Waterhouse has done on some of the dozen or so projects she’s worked on, the job can also involve being the editor, if you will, for the screenwriter.

She has served that role, perhaps most notably, for Hollywood legend Robert Towne. In the ‘70s, he wrote “Chinatown” and a key uncredited scene in “The Godfather” and cemented his reputation forever. Years later, Waterhouse met Towne through his wife and, quite out of the blue, he asked her to take a look at “Tequila Sunrise,” which he’d written and would later direct.

“I found things in it that needed to be fixed,” Waterhouse says. “Lines that didn’t quite go, some technical things I didn’t think would happen in those circumstances” in the story.

A few years later, Towne asked for her help again, she says. “We found we worked well together, because Robert is a consummate writer and doesn’t like editing himself. He doesn’t want that portion of his brain to be functioning while he’s working as a writer. In a sense, I became an editor on his shoulder. It took us a while to develop a trust so he knew I was looking out for the betterment of the script.”

That relationship included work on “Without Limits,” Towne’s 1998 movie of track star Steve Prefontaine and then, two years later, Towne’s second “Mission: Impossible” script, which came to be known as “M: I-2”. That project ate up 18 months of Waterhouse’s life.

So, doc, what’s it like helping to write for the screen?

“It is just an unbelievable high,” Waterhouse says, as we chat outside a Long Beach coffeehouse. As do many writers, she likes solitude -- to a point. She’s happily discovered that script doctoring gives her sufficient doses both of privacy and community -- the latter generally not available when she pursues the wholly solitudinous task of writing a novel, for example.

Then, there’s the work itself. “The beauty of script doctoring is that it’s not just editing,” she says in describing its possibilities. “You are completely restructuring. You’re inventing dialogue. Someone like Robert doesn’t need me to write dialogue for him. But what’s fun is just little changes in a line here or there or to cut a script down so it’s really tight or take a scene from the back and put it up front.”

I assume her students at OCC, where she’s taught a class or two a semester for the last three years (including an occasional screenwriting course), are mightily impressed. Laughing, she says, “They know nothing about it. They’re not all that interested in me. I’m just that old lady standing in front of them teaching them English.”

Of course, some of them noticed last summer when she left to work on “Real Rome,” which turned out to be a bogus project chronicled in The Times in August. Waterhouse was among 18 people apparently hoodwinked into thinking the project’s producer had a green light from HBO. Waterhouse was hired as head writer -- at a reported $6,500 a week -- and used the otherwise distasteful experience to write a funny insider look at what can go wrong in Hollywood.

Waterhouse, 51, has just finished a rewrite for another of her favorites, producer Barnet Bain. He produced “What Dreams May Come” starring Robin Williams and asked Waterhouse to help with a small feature film now in preproduction.

All in a day’s work. In the last decade or so, Waterhouse says she’s sold two forgettable screenplays and had a few others optioned. These days, she’s writing a novel.

And then, of course, is that part of her life that surely must pale in comparison. So, I ask her about OCC.

Get ready for our surprise ending.

She begins by telling me that en route to our interview, she’d been focusing not on showbiz stories but on a touching e-mail from one of her students. A couple hours after we parted, she sent it to me. It reads, in part:

“I wanted to thank you for being an incredible English teacher ... I’ve spent the last eight years of school figuring out ways to not have to do work and never completed a paper longer than two pages

The note got to her.

“It’s not glamorous at all,” she says of her OCC gig. “There are times it makes me nuts, but there’s a reward to it that far transcends what I was doing before.” She mentions Towne, Bain and a third favorite collaborator -- TV producer James Hart -- and says, “I loved working with them, but ultimately you can’t match the reward of something like this e-mail to ‘Mission: Impossible.’ ”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.