Barry Pollack
Barry Pollack
By: Irma Haldane
A screen writer, movie director and emergency room doctor, Barry Pollack of Westlake Village is also an emerging novelist. Never satisfied with the ordinary, Pollack first came to California from New York to attend Stanford, where he made films about medical procedures to help pay for school.
“I met all these doctors and they were very nice people, but I wasn’t intimidated by them,” said Pollack. “I realized that the most money that was being made at Stanford was there in the hospital medical school.”
After graduation, he wrote and directed a successful Hollywood film in 1972 called, “Cool Breeze.” He later made a terrible film about an airplane hijacking. After that, no one would hire him.
He decided to try medical school in the Midwest and returned to California for post-graduate work in emergency medicine at LA County-USC. He now works the graveyard shift at an emergency room in Thousand Oaks.
Pollack also wrote a series of columns for The Ventura County Star over a 10-year period, writing about medicine, travel and biographies of local people. He also recently published his first book titled “Forty-Eight X: The Lemuria Project.” The book is a thriller with science fiction elements and explores the idea of using genetic engineering to turn primates into battlefield-ready fighters so people don’t have to be sent to war.
“Some doctors climb mountains in their spare time,” he said. “I write books.”
Pollack will have a reading and book signing at Barnes & Noble at the Promenade at Westlake in Thousand Oaks on Jan. 23.
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