Mark B. Perry Screenwriter & Novelist

My mother tells a story I don’t remember about someone once asking six-year-old me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Without blinking, I replied, “Jimmy Stewart.” Even at that early age, I was already under the thrall of the movies and TV shows beaming into our den through the rabbit ears of our little black and white Philco. NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies delivered Hollywood’s finest every week, along with small screen treasures like Green Acres, Mission Impossible, The Beverly Hillbillies, Mannix, Get Smart and my favorite, The Dick Van Dyke Show, the latter about an aspiring novelist working in television. Then, in third grade, my imagination was ignited by Mrs. Roslyn Hartsell, who instilled in me a love for words and storytelling, and I began to understand that writers weren’t just confined to the page, but their visions could be brought to vivid life on film. So basically, I’ve known that screenwriting was what I wanted to do for a living since I was eight years old, and today, more grown up than I care to admit and looking back on my nearly four decades in television, I still have moments of childlike awe that any of it actually happened. Still, while television may have consumed almost all of my creative energy, the idea of writing fiction—real fiction like Truman Capote and Pat Conroy and Shirley Jackson—always gnawed at me. If only I could find the time. Or maybe that was just my self-doubt hiding behind a convenient excuse.

I finally got serious—temporarily—in the spring of 1994 when I was on hiatus between seasons of the hit Fox series Party of Five. My friends and I started a writers group as a way to inspire and get feedback on our work. For some time prior, I’d had a story percolating in the back of my mind about the bittersweet side of Hollywood. In my then relatively short time in the business, I’d already seen many dreamers like me come and go, whether leaving through discouragement or having been chewed up and spit out, and I’d heard enough salacious gossip at various industry parties to fill dozens of books. The twilight of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the early 1950s, had always been a fascinating period to me, and it felt like the perfect setting. I had originally been thinking of writing the story in the comfort zone of a script, then, as I started to outline, I decided to take the plunge into prose.

I wrote the first couple of chapters in our little group, and while the feedback was encouraging, I soon had to return to the exciting daily whirlwind of Party of Five. My two measly chapters with the pretentious title Head Dancing in the Urban Idyll were tucked away in a drawer where they would live for nearly two decades. I say “live” because when I rediscovered those early pages while purging my office some years later, I realized my three lead characters—Dan/Dexter, Milly, and Lillian—had been haunting my subconscious since the day I’d first imagined them, and I’d been chipping away at the marble around them to find their juicy stories inside. Sometimes writing really is not writing. So I sat down to revisit my fictional friends and over the next few months the rest of the book poured out of me. It was the most exhilarating writing experience I’d ever had. Unconstrained by the rules of screenwriting, my characters could do anything, go anywhere, say whatever they damned well pleased without the constraints of TV network standards and practices or budgets or pesky studio notes or “auteur” directors and temperamental actors. I pored over draft after draft, smithing my words until I felt they were ready for eyes other than my own.

My most trusted friends seemed to genuinely like it, but I wanted feedback from someone objective. Enter Alice Peck, an extraordinary writer and editor who was referred by my friend Lisa Melamed. Alice seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the book and helped me focus the narrative and trim the fat. The title Head Dancing in the Urban Idyll now seemed as unwieldy as it was lah-de-dah, so after one last pass, I stumbled on a moment where my protagonist, disillusioned by the treachery all around him, reflects that Hollywood was a “town full of nothing but whores.” Huh. A city of whores. It was salacious, eye catching, and (I thought) commercial, so the manuscript went to my then agent at super-mega-fancy-pants-Hollywood-agency CAA with the new moniker, City of Whores.

In retrospect, his reaction may have revealed a discomfort with my subject matter. He pointed out that the gay sex in the novel was more graphic than the straight when, in truth, I thought I’d taken pains to handle the carnal stuff pretty much like they did in pre-1960s Hollywood movies—mostly off-camera/page—so his comment felt revealing. Still, I took a dutiful pass, and he then submitted the manuscript to four or five of the Big Name Publishers, never once expressing any real enthusiasm for the book I believed in. There were no bites, though I have to say I was heartened by one managing editor’s pass: “…he [meaning me] has an assured and cutting take on Hollywood, and he brings this era and this world vividly to life.” Sounds more like a review quote than a rejection letter, right? But my agent didn’t share in my encouragement and seemed to have little interest in submitting to smaller presses where the book might stand a better chance of getting published but was more likely to make less money. And money is, well, the root of all agenting.

After stewing a bit, I decided to self-publish. Starting on the subbasement floor of the learning curve, I made what I thought were all the right moves, including spending way more money than I should have. In the end, I put City of Whores out into the world on August 1, 2014. The critical reception, both professional and personal, was as surprising as it was gratifying. Kirkus Reviews compared the book to my literary idol, Truman Capote, and Foreword praised its plot, pacing, and sparkling historical settings, also naming it as one of their Top 10 Historical Fiction Books of Fall 2014, and if that wasn’t enough, my novel was also a finalist for the 2014 Foreword  INDIES Book of the Year Award for LGBT Adult Fiction. The bulk of the reader reviews on Amazon were similarly positive. Still, something about the story continued to niggle at me. Something not quite right that may have also played a factor in the lackluster sales.

It was my writer friend Patricia V. Davis who at last put it into words. Having worked so long in the collaborative world of TV, I’ve always been open to a smarter pitch and a better idea, and Patricia offered both. First, she pointed out that my spicy title was wholly misleading and not representative of my story. City of Whores promised a book about the duplicity and backstabbing of behind-the-screens Hollywood, whereas my story was about real people in an extraordinary setting, about broken dreams and mended hearts. Second, she offered a few other insights into my narrator that really opened my eyes.

I took her thoughts to heart, “unpublished” the book, and while addressing the character notes she’d given me, discovered a new, more fitting title. This time, from a passage where my still starstruck narrator sees his name on the silver screen in his first film. And Introducing Dexter Gaines. Turns out the third title was the charm.

I next queried Amble Press at Patricia’s suggestion and with author Georgia Kolias’ invaluable help. I referenced the earlier version reviewed by Kirkus and Foreword in my email, and was pleasantly surprised to receive a quick and positive response. A few weeks later, their publisher and editor-in-chief Salem West, and managing editor Eric Peterson sent the email that changed my writing career. Amble definitely wanted to publish my previously self-published book. Based, I can only assume, on literary merit and not previous sales.

There’s no denying the experience has been both heady and educational, and the pre-publication activity exhilarating. But before I get too caught up in all the excitement, I felt I owed it to my readers—past and future—to share this origins story. So if you were one of the many who read City of Whores, I thank you for that early support and encouragement. The feedback and reviews were invaluable to me, almost like being in a writers room full of smart people again, all sharing their input and ideas. I hope I’ve honored you in my rewrite, and that should you decide to revisit my characters, you might fall in love all over again.

And Introducing Dexter Gaines: A Novel of Old Hollywood will be released May 6, 2025.