flash back, feel free to flash forward, feel free to flash back in the middle of a flashback. Feel free to use narration, all the tools are there for you to use." Milius says his writing style was influenced by two novels in particular, Moby-Dick and On the Road: I think Moby Dick is the best work of art ever made ... I used to point out the dramatic entrance of characters, how they were threaded through ... Moby Dick was a perfect screenplay, a perfect example of the kind of drama that I was interested in. Another great influence on me was ... On the Road, which has no tight, linear narrative, but sprawls, following this character. Moby Dick and On the Road are completely different kinds of novels, yet they're both extremely disciplined. Nothing happens by accident in either of those two books. Milius reflected his "ambitions stopped at B Westerns ... I thought that was a good life. I never wanted to be Hitchcock or some big mogul, I didn't want to be Louis B. Mayer. I wanted to be ... Budd Boetticher or something ... John Ford." His short films at film school included The Reversal of Richard Sun (1966), Glut (1967) and Viking Women Don't Care (1967). He wrote a documentary, The Emperor (1967), directed by classmate George Lucas, who also edited an animated short Milius directed called Marcello, I'm So Bored (1967) with John Strawbridge. Marcello, Milius's thesis film, won best animation at the National Student Film Festival and screened around the country in various festivals; it was praised by Vincent Canby of The New York Times. Milius received a job offer to work in animation but he turned it down as he could not see himself "sitting there drawing cell after cell." Career Early Milius's first completed script was Los Gringos (1968). "It actually wasn't bad", he later said. It was sort of like The Wild Bunch ... there was a lot of killing and shooting and riding and dust ... sombreros. ... It was a pretty good idea, actually. It had everything, and it was certainly as original as The Wild Bunch, but it wasn't as skillfully written as later stuff." He followed this with The Last Resort which was optioned by Michael S Laughlin in 1969. Milius says, "Neither of them were ever made, but I was able to option them.