Friends, most writers I know have a piece that they toil away on against all better judgment—a piece that may never find a publisher, and that will never recoup the expense that went into it, not when you add up all the hours and the travel and the sweat and toil. For me, that was my profile of my high school friend John C. Heffernan III, who was my debate partner back in the day, went to Cornell, moved west in search of his fortune, ended up writing the screenplay for the cult classic Snakes on a Plane, and then … disappeared.
Reader, I found him. I wrote about him. And my writing about him was just published in The Hollywood Reporter. Here is the first section:
It was November 2021, deep COVID time, and I had unmasked to have a drink with Kiki Benzon at The Surly Goat, a bar in West Hollywood. I hadn’t seen her in 30 years. In the early 1990s, Kiki and I had been rivals on the über-geeky North American private-school debate circuit; she attended school in British Columbia, I was from Connecticut, and we’d met as seniors at a tournament in Boston, then another in Winnipeg. After we got our stories on the table — my writing, my wife and children, her teaching (film studies at USC), her early recent widowhood — we got around to John Connery Heffernan III.
“Heff” was my high school classmate and debate partner and traveled with me to those long-ago tournaments; at one of them, he and Kiki spent a steamy night together. Kiki and I had both fallen out of touch with Heff, but knowing him, experiencing him, was enough to bond us forever; it was like being part of a secret club. Anyone who knew Heff, even a little, had heard his manic, often brilliant disquisitions on literature, film and hip-hop and had listened to him rhapsodize about fast cars, James Dean, jazz and the horror novels of Clive Barker. All his friends knew the way he reacted to a novel idea or a compelling work of art: He looked truly startled. He would widen his eyes and pull his head back, as if genius was hot to the touch. Maybe because his was.
Both of us knew that in 2006, Heff earned permanent Hollywood B-list infamy as the screenwriter of Snakes on a Plane, the cult classic, so-bad-it’s-good Samuel L. Jackson thriller with the title that explains the movie’s entire plot. Heff had been all over the internet then, and all of us who’d known him had told our friends, “Hey, you know that movie Snakes on a Plane? I dated/debated with/saw a show with/slept with/drank with/drag-raced with/got high with the guy who wrote it.”
In the years since, his trail had gone almost cold. Here’s what we knew from Google: He’d collaborated on a comic book and sold a script that didn’t seem to have been produced. A couple of years earlier, I’d found his Facebook page, with a lot of posts about cars, old TV (he was a Magnum, P.I. fan) and the Detroit Lions.
Our next step was obvious. We had to flush him out. At about midnight, we said goodbye, agreeing to work the web and our old friends to see what we could learn. I got in my rental car, found the I-5 and began cruising toward San Diego, where I had things to do the next day.
An hour later, my phone rang. I answered.
“Mark?” Kiki said. “John’s dead.”
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