I was in Occidental, California over Thanksgiving--on my way to LA to see if I couldn't get my book "Gentleman of Leisure" made into a film. I started talking to my host--who'd gone to high school in San Francisco in the early 70s. I told him some allegedly cool young producer from NY insisted on moving the time of the book up 10 years. Richard--that's my friend--went in to an impassioned rap to set the story in real. time. It had to be in real time, he said. Richard is white, but he'd spend all of his high school years trying to become a black pimp. Every afternoon, he went downtown to look for florescent socks. His car was being hand-customized in the backyard. If you wanted a girl--why, with the civil rights movement in full bloom, you had to at least act black to get any attention. I could not stop Richard's rhapsodies. I knew then that this film--like the book--had to be set at the pantheon of pimpdom. No Iceberg Slim stuff where the girls get terrorized. None of these current simps who don't know what they're doing. No. We needed the real guy--from the days when pimps were kings.