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I moved back to LA, and got some traction there and stayed. I was doing TV and film, but I was getting bored. So I decided to put up Linden Arden again. I wrote a $100 rubber check to secure a tiny theater in West Hollywood and then asked my buddy to back me up, and he wrote me a $500 check, and that’s how I first put it on here.

I did the show. My agents didn’t like it, but I got some killer reviews, and suddenly it was like a big hit. I ran it there for a few months. Then people said it would make a really good screenplay, so I developed that. It still hasn’t been made. I stalked Ed Norton a few times and passed it on once to Al Pacino’s security guard.

Once, I bought a ticket to a Van Morrison show in LA. As I was walking around before the show with the script in my hand, I saw Michael Keaton sitting in a bar. I was so determined to get this film to Van Morrison, so after the show I went up to Keaton and asked him if he would do me a favor. He rolled his eyes, seeing the envelope in my hand. I said, “Can you take this to Van Morrison?” “What?!,” he said, surprised I wasn’t asking him to read the script. “No, I don’t do that,” he said. I told him everything, and some women who were with him talked him into it. I don’t know where it went after that, maybe the first trash can he passed.

Colin Mitchell (photo by Enci Box)

But, it’s been optioned. It’s gotten other nibbles. I did the theater piece again at the 2014 Fringe. It was weird to do it 20 years later. The whole thing was more intense, because I was older. The piece has its own kind of life.

MBM: Why do think “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights” haunted you?

CM: At 19, I heard it and thought, “What is going on there?!” He’s hacking people’s heads off. He’s drinking. He loves the kids. He’s going to church.

It was like the perfect storm when I wrote it. I was really lonely. It was dark times. My career wasn’t going well. I was working two jobs, not making a lot of money. Drinking a lot. I had always thought about it. It’s such a sad song. It’s such an incredibly sad song, and it left me with such a feeling every time I listened to it.

I’ve always wanted to talk to Van Morrison about it, but he’s notoriously prickly about his work. It’s all in honor of him. When I put on the play, the whole album is the intro music as people are getting settled into the theater. If I do make it into a film, I’ll have to get his blessing. I’m not sure how I’m going to manage that.

MBM: Critics view Veedon Fleece as Van Morrison’s most Irish album, and the action in the song takes place in San Francisco in a kind of mythical West. Your “Linden Arden” is set in Scotland with a Scottish-American having fled San Francisco. I’m interested in those choices to stray away from strict adherence to the song.

CM: The song itself was more of a launching point, but it also had enough anchors that I could take flights of fancy and come back to the actual story. There were a lot of influences that had gelled. I traveled in Europe when I was 19. I met this American guy in a bar in Copenhagen. After I bought the guy a few drinks, he told me that he couldn’t go back to the States. “Yeah, I can’t go back. The law and the mob want me dead. I took money from people.” That sense of exile is kind of how I felt when I wrote the piece. That was another thing that came in. I was fascinated by his story as an American expatriate in another country.

Bar ’67 Gallowgate, Glasgow (photo by Leslie Barrie, licensed for reuse)

As for the Scottish/Irish thing: It’s all Celtic to me. My uncles, aunts, and cousins on my mom’s side are all Scottish. I have some Irish ancestry. My mom’s family are all Scottish Catholics. When I went to visit them in Scotland, my cousins took me to a Rangers-Celtic game. After the game, we went to a bar, and it was decorated with all these signs and slogans about Northern Ireland.

It was definitely more of the idea of getting pulled away from home that moved me. For some people, when you find or choose your home, it’s a really big deal. I was an army brat. I moved every two years of my life. I remember when I chose to go to Seattle to live, where I went to college, that was a big deal. So, having this character choose this town, and then have to defend himself and his place there, that was a big thing.

MBM: One of the productions of the play had a tag-line to the effect of “Linden Arden is a man seeking redemption from a town that has no mercy.” Is Linden in exile?

CM: He’s trying to find a home. He meets a girl. I think community is a huge thing. When you meet him in my play, he’s an in-house outcast. He’s already an outcast, but he won’t leave the town. It’s like he’s defying them, saying, “I chose this home. You’re not going to kick me out of it.”

I remember one reviewer said that the character reminded him of the drunken guy at the end of the bar, who is charming and has an amazing story. Then he has one too many drinks, and he gets kind of scary, and you think, “OK, it’s time to go.” That’s how I felt when I was in San Francisco. I was isolated, a fish out of water. It was a perfect time to write that and perform it.

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