Perfect pieces.

• Author: Oney, Steve

Perfect Pieces

As a journalist, Aaron Latham is hardlya household name. Yet rare is the pop-culture consumer unfamiliar with his work--not as it appears on the page, but as it flickers across the screen. Latham, you see, has a knack for writing magazine articles so inherently marketable that Hollywood executives envision cameras rolling and hear cash registers ringing at the mere mention of his byline.

If you loved John Travolta in "UrbanCowboy'--or hated the same actor in "Perfect'--Latham deserves both the credit and the blame. "The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy,' which appeared in Esquire in 1978 and leads off Perfect Pieces*--a collection of Latham's stories from the past 15 years--was responsible for both a box-office bonanza and the early eighties obsession with mechanical bulls and a four-acre Houston saloon named Gilley's. "Perfect,' which appeared in Rolling Stone in 1983 and bats second in this volume, didn't score quite so big when it played at a theater near you (maybe that's because it unleashed upon an unsuspecting public the acting stylings of Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, who portrayed himself). But no contemporary time capsule could be complete without reference to the film and the world it depicts: coed health clubs and the sanitized courting rituals conducted around Nautilus machines.

* Perfect Pieces. Aaron Latham. Arbor House, $17.95.

For most reporters--especially those whobelieve in their words enough to rescue them from perishable periodicals by collecting them between hard covers--a discussion of the movies those words inspired would be not only irrelevant but an insult. Yet such is not the case with Latham. If anything, he seems proud of the fact that his articles are easily converted into film. This happens because Latham has consciously perfected a style of writing meant to trigger Pavlovian "We've got to make this a picture' responses among producers. Call it "treatmentese.'

In an age when even murderers employtheatrical agents, and somewhere, someone is surely already trying to tie up the movie rights to the stories of Iranamok figures like Oliver North, the best get-rich-quick scheme going involves prospecting in the Klondike of true-life tales. As a consequence, journalists--who deal with such material every day--are in the perfect position to become the new '49ers. In other words, if a reporter can stake out a drama from the front pages, sign up the participants, and then dash off a piece that will serve as...