I've been starstruck since I was a kid growing up in Duluth, Minn., and watched Roy Rogers on the big screen. Every Saturday, come rain or shine, I was in the movie theater to escape what I figured was a pretty dreary life in what even then was becoming a rust-belt town.

So last August, as I checked in at the Century City Plaza, a luxury hotel next door to the old Century Pictures back lot, I kept pinching myself. I'd finally made it! I was in Tinsel Town. Not as a tourist, but as a bona fide member of a movie production company.

Wow.

The movie was Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was getting to a good age to become governor, but a little long of tooth, or droopy of butt (more about that later) to be a macho robot from the future brought back in time to help save mankind from evil machines. The production company wanted an author (they kept calling me a "real writer") to do the novelization of the movie. (Hollywood movies are often turned into novels that are released at the same time as the film, on the theory that fans who love the movie will buy the book.) They wanted someone with a strong science background who also wrote thriller novels. So they went to Tor/Forge Books, which is among the largest publishers of sci-fi in the country and which publishes some pretty decent thriller writers-including me.

My 69th novel, Joshua's Hammer, had hit No. 2 on Amazon's best-seller list, and I majored in math and physics in college, so my publisher called one afternoon and announced something to the effect that "Hollywood wanted Hagberg."

I was landed, hook, line and sinker.

Upstairs in my luxury suite, looking out toward fabulous Beverly Hills, I tried to strike an authorial pose, whatever that's supposed to look like, because someone from the production company would be coming over to pick me up for a conference. I'd been talking to the movie people by phone and e-mail for the past few weeks since I'd agreed to the deal, and I noticed they kept calling me the "real writer."

"We're really looking forward to having your input," the pleasant-sounding young woman who was handling what are called the sub-licensing deals told me. "Everyone is totally blown away, I mean excited, that we'll finally get to work with a real writer. It's totally cool."

My wife, Laurie, who can be brutally honest when it comes to my ego, reminded me on more than one occasion through all of this that although I am a writer, a damned fine writer in her estimation, for the purposes of this movie deal I was nothing more than one of the sub-licensees. That's on about the same level as the T3 video games or Schwarzenegger action figures that are released along with the film.

"Remember the Hollywood story Tony told you, about the dumb blonde who slept with the writer in the hopes of getting the part?" Laurie prompted. Writers, Tony had warned me, were at the very bottom of the Hollywood pecking order.

Tony Ray, who was executive producer on the Bette Midler movie The Rose and also on Harry and Tonto, had a lot of pithy things to say about Hollywood. He'd run away from the place with his tail between his legs, damned near wrecked mentally as well as physically.

I got to know him briefly a few years ago when we were across-the-street neighbors and he found out that I was a novelist. Over a couple of beers one afternoon we talked about his background and what Hollywood did to people in general, and specifically what it did to "real writers."

"Look what it's done," he said in his voice that sounded like gravel from years of smoking and drinking and lots of other things. "It killed Fitzgerald, ruined Mario Puzo, who ended up writing garbage, like screenplays for disaster flicks. Heck, even Hemingway admitted defeat."

"Yeah, but those were the old days," I argued. Anyway, Tony was a self-admitted basket case. What did he know? "We're more sophisticated now," I said lamely.

"Listen real close. You get a Hollywood contract, stay out of California. At all costs. If they send you a contract, drive to the California-Nevada border-make sure that you stay on the Nevada side-hand over the signed contract and have them toss over the money. Then get in your car and drive away as fast as you can."

Standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out toward Beverly Hills, I wasn't thinking about Tony's dire warnings. I was in Hollywood. I was going to meet the producers and director of a movie that had already cost them $180 million and change. A major business venture they hoped would earn them, worldwide, a nifty $1 billion.