It turned out to be his first play, an opus called NICHOLAS ROMANOV, with 83 speaking roles and calling for a male a cappella chorus. Writing it with no thought of production, Kinsolving put in everything about the last tsar that he knew. As luck would have it, a director who was going through “my Russian phase” read it and was enthralled. Out of the blue, Kinsolving was awarded a Ford Foundation Playwriting Grant, and the play was produced by the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival.
The production employed every Canadian actor south of the Arctic Circle, including the late great William Hutt as the Tsar, the stunning Franny Hyland as the Tsarina, and the charismatic Leo Ciceri as Rasputin. Plus the Saskatchuan Male Chorus! It resulted in, as one critic opined, “… a very interesting exercise in on-stage crowd control.” Bread riots! Cossack sabre charges! Firing squads!

As a result, the play led to the first of some 54 screenplays on which Kinsolving worked for every major studio (and several distinctly minor ones), in Los Angeles, London and Rome (ask him about Zeffirelli sometime). He started by writing his own screenplays (among them, adapting Fred Exley’s great American novel A FAN’S NOTES for Warner Brothers), but soon discovered the basic Hollywood rubric: Everyone and his mother, lover, and pool-cleaner is allowed to rewrite screenplays, based on reasoning that would mystify God. Therefore Kinsolving moved adroitly to become a script doctor, the last person to rewrite. A couple of four-hour mini-series for the networks were generated, as well as his gathering enough behind-the-scenes gossip and scandal with which to regale dinner parties for the rest of his life.
Suspecting that such a routine was leading to the utter corruption of his soul (not to dare mention his body), Kinsolving pitched an idea for a film to (then) Twentieth-Century-Fox for whom he’d worked on fixing a number of scripts. When they bought the pitch, he urged them to let him write it first as a novel, following that with the screenplay. Astoundingly, they agreed, and Kinsolving retreated to Carmel to write the first of his novels, BORN WITH THE CENTURY. To Fox’s stunned surprise and Kinsolving’s apoplectic joy, it became a best seller. Subsequently as he was writing the screenplay, a bitchy but Hollywood-vicious corporate takeover of the studio occurred. The film was never made, but the book allowed Kinsolving a graceful departure from the sun-soaked madness of Southern California.
While serving on the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of the Arts (CALARTS), he had met and been smart enough to marry Susan née Baumann now Kinsolving, the poet. She then presented him with two astonishing daughters, and presently puts up with him in Connecticut. Quixotically between writing books and plays, he joined the Board of Directors of both The Actors’ Company, as well as a California biotech corporation.
When time permits, he has regressed happily to saloon singing and fundraising performances, accompanied by the likes of Peter Duchin and Emmanuel Ax, singing at the Algonquin Hotel’s late lamented Oak Room and for one of the late Brooke Astor’s better birthday parties, among many other less name-dropping venues.