Wax on, wax off. Yes, Robert Kamen (above) is the dude who wrote the iconic line. He’s also written numerous screenplays that have been made into Hollywood blockbusters.

Yawn. That’s the least interesting part of the story.

In my view of the world, what’s really fascinating about Robert is that he inadvertently and unwittingly financed California’s biodyanmic movement.

Robert comes to Texas every year to speak a wine dinner at the swank restaurant Tony’s in Houston, owned by my friend and client Tony Vallone.

He’ll be there next week, doing his song and dance for the petroleum crowd, but I’ll be in Italy doing a job for a client of mine (the event is already sold-out btw).

So I called him the other day and asked him about how, why, and when he decided to hire Phil Coturri — the father of California’s biodynamic movement — and if he had intended to play the role of the movement’s financier.

The story’s been told many times. Back in 1980, Robert sold his first screenplay and went up to Sonoma to party in celebration. A few weeks later, using the money from the script, he purchased the property that would ultimately become his Kamen Estate, now famous for its “mountain Cabernet” and a line of wines that commands respect among wine professionals who might otherwise write off yet another Northern Californian wine produced by a “Hollywood guy.”

But don’t use the binomial “Hollywood guy” around Robert. It really gets under his skin.

“Look at the wineries owned by ‘Hollywood guys,'” he said to me, obviously ticked off. “They planted vineyards. I planted a farm.”

“We don’t just grow grapes here. Six months of the year, Phil grows grapes. The other six months of the year, he grows cover crops.”

“When I hired Phil [in 1980],” said Robert, he wasn’t “thinking in terms of the future. I just didn’t want to do things that were deleterious to the property.”

At the time “Phil’s rap was so compelling. And it was just fortuitous because the organic movement was just picking up then.”

I asked if he saw himself as pioneer in organic and biodyanmic farming in the Northern California wine community.

Yes, he said, “but I’m not a proselytizer. I’m not a crusader.”

Today, he told me, the Kamen estate in Sonoma (replanted in 1996 after a fire destroyed the vineyards) is the model that Phil uses to show other grape growers who are interested in converting to organic and biodynamic farming.

His farm “was the laboratory” for the biodynamic movement. Today “it is the showcase,” said Robert.

So why, I asked, did he hire Phil in the first place?

“After I sold my first script and came up here, we partied all night long on the property” that he would buy a few weeks later.

“I wanted to meet the guy who grew the pot we smoked… because I wanted to buy more. It was that good. And that guy was Phil.”

I asked Robert if it was okay for me to post this information on my blog. He said, sure, go ahead.

I can’t post the words that he reserved for our president and the federal government’s attitude regarding the states’ legalization of medicinal and recreational marijuana. But that’s another story.

And although it really has nothing to do with this story, I just have to share one last nugget.

When I asked Robert where Phil learned to grow grapes, here’s what he said.

“Phil’s a farmer — an Italian farmer. In 1974, he went to work his first harvest at Mayacamus. And the guy who taught him was named Joe Miami. I’m not making that up.”

When a Hollywood New York screenwriter tells you that he’s not making shit up, you KNOW it has to be true.