Today we’d like to introduce you to Duke Haney.
Hi Duke, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia. My parents both grew up on farms on the outskirts of Charlottesville and I spent a lot of time on my grandparents’ farms as a child. I was interested for as long as I can remember in history and art of almost every kind and excelled at drawing and painting.
It was presumed that I would pursue a career as a painter or maybe an illustrator, but I fell in love with movies in my early teens and decided to become an actor. My role models were “Method” actors of the New York school like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and so on, but I was a little nervous about moving alone to New York at eighteen, so to sort of graduate into urban life, I spent a summer in a theater program in Washington, D.C. I met the brother of Montgomery Clift, Brooks Clift, that summer, and he gave me some life-changing advice. In essence, he said that I would never be a great actor unless I read great books, so I started to tackle the classics, from the Greeks to the Elizabethans to the Symbolists to the modernists, and that was my genesis as a writer. I had done a little writing in high school—I was co-editor of my high-school yearbook in fact—but I had no aspirations as a writer until I became a literary autodidact.
In New York, I was signed by a manager with whom I collaborated on a couple of screenplays, one of which won some sort of prize from the Writers Guild, though only my manager was credited for the screenplay. By collaborating with him, I was in effect paying for his managerial services since my earnings as an actor were nominal. I made my feature-film debut in a low-budget thriller shot in Nova Scotia, but I’m afraid I was terrible in it, despite studying with some stellar teachers, including Mira Rostova, who had been Montgomery Clift’s personal coach, and Frank Corsaro, the artistic director of the Actors Studio. People used to tell me I resembled James Dean, so I tried to be James Dean, dressing and slouching and mumbling like him, but eventually I outgrew all that and developed my own style as an actor. I performed in fringe theater and student’s films, one of them directed by Joseph Minion, who later wrote “After Hours” for Martin Scorsese.
It was because of Joseph Minion that I moved to L.A. He had been hired to direct a movie for the so-called King of the Bs, Roger Corman, and I was hired, over the phone in New York, to star in the movie, which had no screenplay when I arrived—many Corman movies were rushed into production with half-written or hastily written screenplays—so I pitched in, and before long I had taken over the writing completely. That led, within weeks, to more screenwriting jobs, including the latest “Friday the 13th” sequel. So suddenly, I had a career I had never really sought, and every screenplay contained a role I had written for myself, but I was almost never allowed to play the role since I was viewed as a writer, not an actor. One part I did play was in a movie directed by an incompetent psycho in Yugoslavia, and dealing with him caused me to have panic attacks so that I returned to the States a psychological wreck. I was never the same after that movie. I decided I wasn’t hardy enough to be the famous actor I had dreamed of being; if I had fallen apart once, I could fall apart again, and the spotlight would make it that much worse.
Later I did become somewhat famous when I did another movie in Yugoslavia, and while I didn’t fall apart on that one, I didn’t much enjoy my brief celebrity. People weren’t reacting to me but a notion of me. I continued to work in movies for a while afterward, but I had lost my passion for them. I did not, however, lose my passion for film history. It was the new ones I largely disliked. I tried to write a novel, but I could never complete it to my satisfaction and finally shelved it. I didn’t think I would ever attempt another novel and began to immerse myself in the underground music scene, which inspired “Banned for Life,” my novel about punk rock that was published, after nine years of labor, in 2009. Another inspiration for “Banned for Life” was a near-fatal accident: I was mowed down by a car while walking across a street in Hollywood and hospitalized for six weeks. I changed the circumstances of the accident in “Banned for Life,” which is a profane book, very masculine and no doubt shocking by current standards. I meant it to be a little shocking, but these days it should probably be sold with an accompanying prescription for tranquilizers. To promote the book, I started writing autobiographical essays for an online magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, and they proved so popular that they were collected and published in book form.
The book was titled “Subversia,” and its publisher wanted me to follow it with another collection, this one focusing on what he regarded as my forte topics, film and LA history of the noir sort. I resisted him initially because I wanted to write another novel, but one day I met someone who had known Sean Flynn, the tragic son of Errol Flynn, and I subsequently wrote an essay about Sean that made me realize I could and should devote myself to a book about people like him. I could also write about some of my own experiences in the book since the idea was to create a kind of mosaic portrait of L.A., so I embarked on what became “Death Valley Superstars: Occasionally Fatal Adventures in Filmland,” which was published on Christmas Eve 2018. I used my nickname as my pen name for the first time with that book. I was “D. R. Haney” for my first two, but too many people took “D. R.” to mean I was a physician, and most know me as Duke anyway. Duke derives from the accident, after which a friend joked that I walked like John “Duke” Wayne. My given name is Daryl Reid Haney, but I figured I had tainted it during my movie career. I still hope to write another novel. I’ve had plans for one since 2016, but I’ve had trouble starting it. I had similar trouble with “Banned for Life,” so I’m confident I’ll find my way into it eventually.
But a funny thing happened this summer: I stumbled upon a true Hollywood that had never been told and found myself digging through newspaper archives and cold-calling an astonishing array of people who knew my subject, an actor who should have been famous but perished without so much as an obituary. Researching this story has been like nothing else I’ve experienced in my writing life, and since I doubt there will be enough material for a book, it will likely become part of an expanded edition of “Death Valley Superstars.” Some have suggested that I write a sequel to “Death Valley Superstars,” but that would have the effect of making Hollywood scandal and tragedy my so-called brand, and that isn’t how I see myself at all. I was especially adept at painting portraits as a child, and both acting and the novel are arts of portraiture, so I think I’ve always been a portraitist a heart. That’s what I write, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction: portraits in as much detail as I’m capable of bringing to them without exhausting the reader. It’s my aim, in fact, to always enliven the reader.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Writing has been a smooth road for me only in that it found me when I was set on doing something else entirely. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done, but I was raised with a strong work ethic that was strengthened by my experience as an actor: I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere unless I gave it 110 percent. There are times when I’m lazy, but that’s part of the writing process; you have to step away and let the material marinate without any interference from the rational mind. I mentioned the problem I had starting “Banned for Life.” Well, one night I went to bed feeling fairly hopeless about it, and the next morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, the first words of the book were there. I knew they were perfect before I said them aloud, which I did, and I swear this is true: my computer was “asleep” on my desk a few feet away, and the instant I uttered those words, the computer screen lit up as if to invite me to rise from my bed and sit at the desk and begin writing, which I also did. It was magical. Most writing problems require a great deal of conscious thought—that’s the only way they can be solved—but when all else fails, it’s best to let the unconscious mind take over.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m drawn to stories about the performing arts. I was a performer, after all, and I still have the temperament of one but the sensibility of a writer. I don’t like making claims for myself; I think the writing speaks for itself, and I would hope it reflects my perfectionism in matters of style and my fastidiousness as a researcher—everything I write, fiction or nonfiction, is grounded in research. I mentioned earlier that I aim to enliven the reader. I like entertaining, but not at the expense of depth and insight. I think, with so much competition from electronic media, a writer has to be entertaining or forfeit any shot at a readership. This is hardly the age of print, but I remain committed to it. It’s the permanent record, to quote my writer-publisher friend Mike Stax.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
I taught myself to write by doing a lot of it and poring over the results, which I compared to the best stuff of others. Judicious reading is the best preparation for writing, and by that I mean reading work that’s endured for decades or centuries, not just the work of one’s contemporaries and cronies. I was mentored, in a sense, by William Faulkner simply by reading him. Those are the mentors you want: the greatest writers who ever lived, even if they happen to be dead. But they’re never dead on the page. Writing is a solitary pursuit, so networking is it odds with it, but I suppose I believe that once the work is out there, the networking begins automatically. People find you, sometimes to your detriment, since they ask for time that would be better spent writing. Writers are constantly receiving requests to read manuscripts. It’s an occupational hazard, but it’s also part of the necessary evil of networking. You can’t expect your back to be scratched if you decline to scratch others, and we all need feedback.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://dukehaney.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dukehaney/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drhaney/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/subversia
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ironduke2000
