Killers can also do psychic harm

In the moment that writer-director Todd Robinson was rolling his bright red Siai Marchetti upside down in the sky over the beaches of Malibu, it was hard to recall the 10-second speech about how to jump safely from the airplane in an emergency.

Wearing a dark blue flight jacket, jeans, black ball cap, sunglasses and grin, Robinson (“White Squall”) clearly relishes flying, which he’s done whenever possible for nearly 20 years. He takes off from Santa Monica Airport (home also to the aviation assets of Harrison Ford and Kurt Russell) on a breezy Friday afternoon and flies in formation insanely close to his pilot buddy while casually talking about his new movie, “Lonely Hearts,” opening April 13.

Despite having studied in the theater conservatory at Adelphi University, Robinson has the genial stockiness and relaxed, confident tone of a small-town cop. Which makes more sense when you discover that his grandfather Elmer was a homicide detective in the Nassau County (N.Y.) Police Department for 38 years and “Lonely Hearts” is based on the intersection of his family’s buried traumas and one of his grandfather’s most grisly cases.

In the late 1940s, Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez (Salma Hayak and Jared Leto) went on a killing spree and became known as the Lonely Hearts Killers because of their tendency to prey on single women in the personal ads. With his partner (James Gandolfini), Elmer (John Travolta) obsessively pursues the case as he struggles to deal with the crushing guilt he feels over his wife’s suicide.

In real life, Robinson’s grandmother also committed suicide (in a way and timeframe different from in the movie), but not before telling her husband how much she resented the effects of his work on her life. These circumstances were only revealed to Robinson in adulthood by his mother, and he worked for almost 10 years to make the deeply personal story, some of which he condensed for dramatic purposes, his directorial debut.

“The central idea that got me to stick with this thing was the notion that there is a collateral effect in terms of what you do and how that affects the people you love,” Robinson says.

Before he passed away in 1991, Robinson’s grandfather would occasionally talk about the murders he investigated, but as a younger man in the thick of that gruesome world the salty, old-school cop always kept those horrors to himself.

“He had this great code for his life: A crime is committed, you persecute, you prosecute, and you punish,” Robinson says of his grandfather, who also built airplanes before becoming a detective. “It’s got a beginning, a middle and end. It wraps up. Of course, he wasn’t equipped to deal with the psychic damage that it was doing to him and that was coming home and infecting everybody around him.”

Ultimately, Robinson’s grandfather helped catch the killers and even witnessed their executions in 1951. In defending the necessity of his film’s graphic depiction of them as a false resolution, Robinson suddenly had a flash from his childhood. Whenever his grandfather was at their house, the family was forbidden to cook chicken. The smell, which would evoke sense memories of the execution, reduced “this big, scary, brutish man” to physical sickness.

Though Robinson’s father, who is also a character in the film, passed away last year, he saw a near-final cut before he died. The filmmaker believes that the movie’s exploration of his grandfather’s day-to-day working life finally allowed his own father to forgive Elmer for his distracting professional obsessions.

He couches

his expertise

Dennis Palumbo is a man with a unique vantage on the psychological health of Hollywood’s scribbling class. And with chatter about a possible fall writers’ strike gaining volume, this would be a good time to check in on the mental wellness of the screenwriting community.

A former film and TV writer (“My Favorite Year,” “Welcome Back, Kotter”), Palumbo retired from show business when he got his therapy license in 1991, and he gears his practice toward dealing with creative issues. Seventy percent of his clients are TV and/or film writers, from Oscar and Emmy winners to struggling scribes (he also works with directors and musicians).

Grumblings about a strike have begun to ripple from studios to agencies to writers and their families, and while no one knows what will happen come November when the current WGA contract expires, let’s just say that Palumbo’s referrals have begun multiplying.

“This is sort of like tax season for accountants,” Palumbo says. “You get the awards season from January to March, which makes everybody nuts, and then in television you have staffing season from now until about June, which makes everybody nuts, and then you have all the big summer movies that come out, which just depress ... all the screenwriters.” And that’s before the possibility of a strike.

Many writers have begun tripling their workload, hustling through assignments, and scrambling to get meetings for hopeful pitch sales. They’re pulling old scripts out of the drawer since spec sales have begun to go up for the first time in years as production companies and studios do their own stockpiling.

Meanwhile, job openings are increasingly scarce as development slates shrink and TV writers -- even those with unimpeachable resumes -- watch as their sitcom positions are replaced by reality programming, which is staffed by writers outside of the WGA contract.

The stress effects are already obvious to Palumbo, who has seen an increase in substance abuse, weeklong disappearances into hotel rooms to slug out assignments, and family tension.

At 56 years old, Palumbo is a survivor of several writers’ strikes, including the bloodbath of 1985 (1988 and 2001 were also damaging to varying degrees). “I know a lot of older writers whose careers never recovered from the last one,” he says. The risk becomes about more than losing a development deal or a greenlight -- it can mean losing important momentum, good credit, a house, even a career.

Palumbo points out that, additionally, there are deep-seated issues triggered by the screenwriters’ undervalued position in the industry, especially during the acrimonious lead-up to a strike: dependency, infantilism, resentment, the search for respect and approval from management, or “the mean stepdad” who constantly puts them down.

“Psychologically, writers are like the children of show business,” Palumbo says. “[A strike] creates an adversarial relationship, and they’re very vulnerable to what their ‘parents’ do. I think most people come from all over the country to find an approving parent -- that’s why they get into show business. And it’s probably the worst place in the world to find one.”

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Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. Please e-mail any tips or comments to fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.