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A congenital bone disease kept Richard Quinn the size of a 10- year-old and took him from ambulatory to cane-dependent to wheelchair-bound. The disease, Ehrenfried's syndrome, did not, however, diminish his determination.
Richard was determined about a number of things. He was determined to be independent and self-supporting, and determined to help a troubled boy, the son of people he knew. He was determined, too, to be a part of the movie business. Working as a police dispatcher and an Amtrak reservation-taker, he clung to the edges of the film industry and hoped one day to be allowed inside.
In 1979, a man named Eugene Mandelcorn advertised in The Recycler for spec scripts for a low-budget cable TV series he called "The Sandman." It involved a vigilante who captured criminals by putting them to sleep with a special gun. Richard submitted a script that Eugene liked. Eugene even let Richard direct the episode he wrote.
"The Sandman" didn't exactly give Steven Bochco nightmares about lost ratings points, but Richard and Eugene, who works at the Los Angeles Central Library, became friends. In 1990, they teamed up to do a Siskel-and-Ebert-type show on local-access cable TV. It was called "Hollywood Unseen Videos" and was devoted to what Richard once called on-air "the B-movies, the Z-movies, the films the big guys wouldn't even want to talk about."