SONOMA’S STORYTELLER

ROBERT KAMEN IS ONE OF HOLLYWOOD’S MOST PROLIFIC SCREENWRITERS, BUT HIS GREATEST CHALLENGE HAS BEEN A VINEYARD HE FELL IN LOVE WITH FOUR DECADES AGO

- MITCH FRANK

ROBERT KAMEN HAS A STORY TO TELL YOU.

The Hollywood screenwriter, known for films such as Taken, The Karate Kid, The Transporter and many more, has always had a sense of adventure, a desire to see the world, drink it all in and then weave a tale based on his experiences and the people he’s met.

Sitting with him, he’ll tell you about how he spent four months on horseback in 1971, riding through Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains, or the time he journeyed through Laos just six weeks before the Communist Pathet Lao—known for executing American backpackers as presumed spies—took power. “That was dumb,” Kamen says now.

Or about the months he spent with Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford in a trailer in 1996, rewriting most of the scenes in The Devil’s Own on the fly. Or the time he flew to Paris, expecting to be wined and dined, only to spend three weeks in a freezing cold, rundown factory on the outskirts of town, trying to make sense of 300 pages of sci-fi scribblings about Mondoshawans, Mangalores and a cab driver named Korben Dallas.

He loves adventure, he loves people, and he uses these as inspiration for his scripts. “I actually like the ‘make shit up’ part of it,” Kamen says. “I love the intellectual pursuit of creating on a very particular scale. Writing stimulates that part of me that makes me feel frustrated and alive.”

But for years, Kamen, 74, felt particularly frustrated by one story he struggled to tell. And the lead character is not a teenager or a kind-hearted hit man or a wise karate master. It’s a piece of land just uphill from the town of Sonoma: a sunlit slope more than 1,000 feet above the valley floor atop an extinct volcano.