None of the films he wrote raked in box-office millions, but people speak about him in superlatives—that he's one of a kind, that he's his own genre.
When asked how he's doing, the writer Rudy Wurlitzer has a handful of standard responses: "I'm tap-dancing on a rubber raft," he'll say, or "I'm still on this side of the grass," or "I'm stretched out in front of the Trail's End Saloon, staring into the big empty." Maybe he believes that. But to an outside observer he would seem, at 78, to be faring pretty well. His hips and knees are periodically attacked by surgeons, so he walks with a limp, but he's got the handsomeness of an elder statesman and a perverse mind working at its peak.
