CAPE GIRARDEAU NATIVE'S SCREENPLAY FILMING IN L.A.

In the movie "Fight Club" now being made in Los Angeles, Brad Pitt's character goes to a club where regular guys fight each other to blow off steam.

But he takes the fights further, into total anarchy, and tries to disrupt civilization in what screenwriter Jim Uhls calls "a dark sociological comedy."

When the film opens, the Cape Girardeau native will get his first film credit of his nearly 15-year career in Hollywood. It is the kind of breakthrough that can lead to rediscovery of a writer's old scripts and, he hopes, a shot at directing.

Uhls lives in Santa Monica, Calif. He is in Cape Girardeau this week visiting his family, including his mother, Inez, and brother Mike. A sister, Pam, lives in Texas.

"Fight Club" is not Uhls' first break. That was "Dead Reckoning," an original screenplay he sold in 1989. "Dead Reckoning" is set in a future in which all the inhabitants of the Earth live below ground and travel by a subterranean train that runs amok.

"Dead Reckoning" was a monetary bonanza. He was paid $250,000 for the screenplay and would have received another $150,000 had the film been made. But it wasn't.

Ridley Scott ("Blade Runner") was the first director attached to the film. He dropped out. Then Roland Emmerich ("Independence Day," "Godzilla") was lined up with Sylvester Stallone to star. No go.

Next the studio that bought the script, Carolco, went bankrupt. The story recently was optioned by Tri-Star so it still could make it to the screen.

Another Uhls script, "Hard Hearts," has been optioned by three different studios and now is back in his possession. "Hard Hearts" is a neurotic romance between bounty hunters.

By now Uhls is accustomed to the capricious winds of Hollywood. "Most satires on Hollywood ... look like documentaries," he says.

But he has never considered giving up. "Not as long as I can benefit from the insanity," he says wryly.

Uhls is the tall, soft-spoken son of the late Joe Uhls, longtime baseball coach at Southeast Missouri State University. He played sandlot sports but never the organized variety here and says his father didn't expect him to.

"He had a side of him that was an entertainer also," Uhls says.

He was graduated from Cape Central High School in 1975. There he appeared in "You Can't Take It With You" and wrote comedy sketches with friends. He recalls an English teacher, Mary Ellen Sharp, who liked his short stories.

He studied theater at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. One summer vacation he returned to Cape Girardeau to stage a children's musical he had written, "A Chance to Fly."

The director was the late Ann Abbott of the Associated Community Theater. Uhls said Abbott also encouraged him. "She gave me some of my most interesting roles out of high school."

Narrowly turned down by Yale University, he took a master's degree in play writing from UCLA. Afterward, some of his plays were produced at small theaters in Los Angeles and he wrote an unproduced horror script.

Uhls also spent six months as a writer for the soap opera "Search for Tomorrow." "I never think I ever figured out what was good and what was not" he says of that writing.

His own writing begins every day as soon as he awakens. "There is a morning wave of creativity that arises on waking," he says.

Stories come in pieces. "I don't know where they come from," he says. "It must just be from the subconscious mind."

"Fight Club" is based on a book by first-time novelist Chuck Palahniuk. Besides Pitt, the cast includes Edward Norton II, Helena Bonham Carter and Meat Loaf. David Fincher ("Seven," "The Game") is the director.

Though having a movie is the best way to get jobs in Hollywood, Uhls had lined up three more writing projects even before his name went on "Fight Club." One is a screenplay for the book "Last Train to Memphis," which covers Elvis' life from birth to age 25. Another, "Life During Wartime," pits the East against the West in a future civil war. It's another screenplay adapted from a novel.

The third project is "Trick Monkey," which is based on another writer's idea about a young magician conning people on the streets of New York City. Not to out-do "Fight Club" but Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro are on board.