Mickey Wolfmann isn't so odd

[Richard Fiero]

Offering a brief bio of a real person:

Coco Brown (Harry Joe Brown Jr.) was born in 1934 (died in 2005) in 
Beverly Hills, and grew up there. His mother, Sally Eilers, starred 
in movies with Buster Keaton and Spencer Tracy. His father, for whom 
he was named, produced many movies for RKO, Warner Brothers and 20th 
Century Fox, among other studios. Born into Hollywood royalty.
The younger Mr. Brown was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, 
Stanford and Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude, and went on to 
earn a master's degree at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar.
He sold for $30,000 at the time his 1962 screenplay of about 30 
pages, single-sided double-spaced to the Mirisch brothers which was 
made into "Duffy," a robbery caper, produced by Columbia Pictures in 
1970. He produced Off Broadway plays by Edward Albee and Samuel 
Beckett, as well as a Tennessee Williams play in London. For a time, 
he lived the artist's life in Paris.
His first major real estate coup was buying 188 acres at the top of 
Beverly Hills, and building 115 houses there, according to The 
National Post, a Canadian newspaper.
In the early 1990's, Mr. Brown scavenged through failed savings and 
loans for cheap properties. A tangled deal in Cape Cod resulted in 
his pleading guilty in 1997 to making false statements to federal 
regulators. He spent 27 days in a federal prison camp in 
Pennsylvania. The Times reported he still made $8.4 million on the transaction.
In one of the country's most fashionable vacation spots - the 
Hamptons - developer Harry Coco Brown had completed the first house 
of his development, Houses at Sagaponac and placed it on the market 
for $3 million by 2004.

A former head of development for 20th Century Fox, Brown put together 
his development on an approximately 120-acre failed subdivision he 
bought in the Hamptons. Brown approached his project like an art 
film, getting star architects to give him cut rate prices on their 
designs. Product placement also helped Brown save money and bring 
construction costs down to approximately $250 a square foot.