Lori Prokop to the Rescue

It’s been eight months since I last wrote about Lori Prokop  (best known for her Book Millionaire debacle) and I often wonder what she’s up to these days (surprisingly, she’s finally gotten around to excising me from her spam mailing list). Maybe while I am away, this post from March 2006 will inspire someone to check up on Lori Prokop for me.

Onephoto_1_2 Lori Prokop, the self-described "selfless supporter of families, children and animals," is apparently tired of blogs like this one mischaracterizing her as a get-rich-quick huckster. In fact, "her life goal is to advance the well-being and enlightenment of humanity" when she isn’t selflessly striving to help the downtrodden "achieve the goal of Best Selling and Celebrity Status"  and showing "people how to choose most any car off the showroom floor and drive it free while our company makes your payments."

So Lori Prokop, who "lives in and creates from the upper energy levels of life  (Anyone can choose to live and create in these powerful upper levels as detailed in Lori Prokop’s Life Guidance System)," is tackling the problem as only she, Lori Prokop, can:

Blogs are a powerful force for good in the hands of those people living in their upper level energies/emotions and less-than-good in the hands of those living in their lower level energies/emotions. (Continue reading to learn about the Energy Mastery System.)

Lori Prokop has an upcoming work being release called, “Launching from Good to Great Online,” which is a definitive work on blogs where she interviews leaders and experts in blogs and human psychology.

I, for one, am looking forward to this definitive work which, no doubt, will be published by Bestseller Publishing, the vanity press run by future Nobel Prize winner Lori Prokop, who describes herself in her fascinating and definitive mass mailings as "Leading Expert, Author and Creator of books, CDs,DVDs, Online Videos, workshops, television shows, speaking and more!"

To learn more about this selfless individual, who has  profound "respect and humanistic regard for all species," (She is, afterall, the visionary who asked the burning question: "Where are the best sellers by Doctors of  Chiropractic?”) just read her previous definitive books, like "Awaken Your Million-Dollar Intuition," "77 Streams of Super Lucrative Income for Authors, Experts and Speakers," and Employee No More: How to Stay Home and Still Make Money."

You, too, can feel her humanistic regard, especially for those species who possess a Visa or Mastercard.

How To Write a Treatment

This was originally posted back in June 2005…but since I get asked this question a lot, and I am on a plane to Germany right now, I thought I’d share it with you again.

Bryon Stedman  asked me this question in a comment to another post:

I have a situation where a broadcast entity claims they want to hear my idea for a boxing series or made for TV movie. The characters belong to my family from a comic drawn by my father.

If a narrative is they way to go, what are the key points to include? Do I go as far as dialog and cameas shots and locations or simply text with main characters CAPITALIZED? Advice requested and appreciated.

A series treatment and a TV movie treatment are very different. A series treatment sells the characters and the franchise of the show…the relationships and format that will generate stories week after week. A TV movie treatment sells a story.

If the studio is already familiar with your Dad’s comic, I don’t know why they need you to come up with a series treatment…the strip itself sells that or they wouldn’t be interested in the first place.

A series treatment isn’t about telling a story…it’s about describing the characters, how they interact within the unique format of your show. Who are they? What do they do? And how will who they are and what they do generate 100 interesting stories?

For a TV movie treatment, you’re selling the characters and their story.  At this point, you’re trying to sell the broadstrokes…they can pay you to work out the rest. Write up a punchy over-view of what happens in the story, as if you were writing a review of a great movie (only minus the praise). You want to convey the style and tone of the movie. But don’t go into great detail. Keep it short, tight and punchy.And whatever you do, DON’T include camera shots or dialogue.

Don’t fixate on treatment format, because there isn’t one. Tell your story in the style that works best for you. Don’t worry about whether the character names are in capitals or not (it doesn’t matter). Concentrate on telling a strong story.

On the Fast Track

I am taking a quick trip to Germany today to meet our leading candidate to direct FAST TRACK, the movie/pilot that I’m writing and producing…and that goes into production in Berlin on May 20th. I will also be meeting with the studio, the network, our German casting director, and a number of other folks. Then I return to L.A. on the 22nd to celebrate my wedding anniversary…and attend the U.S. casting sessions. Then it’s back to Germany on March 29 for three weeks of pre-production on the pilot and the development of the stories for the first eight episodes.

FYI – I have been hit with a lot of comment spam lately, so while I am away, I will be holding comments for review before posting them.

The Saint

Variety reports today a bit of news that I’ve known for months:  TNT is developing a new, TV series version of THE SAINT. The producer is William J. McDonald and even though he was involved in the horrendous movie version with Val Kilmer a few years ago, I’m told by sources in-the-know that this project will be more loyal to the character immortalized in the novels by Leslie Charteris.   Jorge Zamacona (HOMICIDE, WANTED) is writing the script.

Call’em as you See’em

Karen Scott talks on her blog about how much she likes sex scenes that tell it like it is:

I love good sex scenes in my books. I love books that call a cock, a cock, and a pussy, a pussy…

That’s certainly what I try to do in all my DIAGNOSIS MURDER books. Karen believes that sex scenes are required in a good romance novel. 

If the love scenes are well written, then I’m likely to buy, if not, I’ll
probably leave it on the shelf. Does that confirm every stereo-type out there
about romance readers? Probably, but I’m not here to promote respect for the
genre, so I couldn’t really care less.

[…]It
bemuses me to think that there are hundreds of thousands of romance readers out
there who pretend that sex in books don’t matter to them, when in reality, it’s
probably what they’re secretly looking for.

Secretly? All you have to do is look at the covers to know what the books are selling and what the readers are buying.

Ghost Riding

The friendly folks over at Bookgasm conducted a terrific interview with IAMTW member Greg Cox about writing comic book tie-ins and movie novelizations (most recently, the tie-in for the comic-turned-movie GHOST RIDER). It’s a revealing peek into the creative obstacles a tie-in writer often faces:

BOOKGASM: What do you find attractive about writing novelizations? And what’s not-so-attractive?

COX: On the positive side, you get to let someone else worry about the plotting and dialogue for once. It’s also just neat, on a fannish level, to be privy to the inside scoop on some upcoming new movie. The challenge is trying to describe a movie you haven’t actually seen; I’m always desperate for any sort of visual reference material I can get from the studio. Getting photos of the supporting characters tends to be difficult sometimes. The deadlines can be pretty tight, too.

BOOKGASM: When you finally see a film you earlier wrote a novelization for, what’s that experience like?

COX: Usually, it takes a couple of viewings before I can appreciate the movie on its own terms. The first time through, I’m too busy wincing at all the differences between the book and the movie. “Hey, what happened to the barn scene? That chase doesn’t go there. Ohmigod, they changed the dialogue. Wait a second, nobody told me that character was a woman!”

 

LAW AND ORDER is everywhere

Fred We live in a LAW AND ORDER world. First comes news this morning that real-life politician Fred Dalton 28360329a_1 Thomspson, who plays a D.A. on LAW & ORDER , is considering a run for the White House (following in the footsteps of former L&O star Michael Moriarty, who also considered it). Then I stumbled on an article about the trial of media tycoon Conrad Black, which included a picture of the prosecutors, who posed as if they were auditioning for another LAW AND ORDER series. Pretty soon, all family photos will look this way.

A Sweet Guy

I got this email a couple of weeks ago and My brother Tod got one very much like it from the same guy:

Take
your slanders about me off your blog now, Goldberg.  You thought it was cool
and you could destroy someone with your filth.  Take it off, I beg you.  I don’t
really know what I’m capable of, but this force is getting beyond the inertia
phase, and if you don’t silently retract this shit against me, I might
have to spend a lot of time and money convincing you that this was not a right
transaction.  I don’t know you and don’t want to.  Just take all
reference to me off your blog or I might get the idea to buy some people to make your life difficult.  You had
a good laugh at my expense in cyberspace and you think you can just get away
with it without any consequences but that’s not how it works.  If I have
to come to where you live and beat the shit out of you or hire others to do so,
well, then, what did you expect?  Get this stuff about me off your internet
sites or pay the price.  I’m really fed up with your idiocy and am
convinced that you need to be taught a lesson, asshole.

I didn’t respond to this one. Instead, I called a friend at the LAPD, we filed a police report, and got a restraining order against the guy who, as it turns out, still lives at home with his mother.

As The Crow Flies

Crow_business_card My friend Bryce Zabel talks about the development of his TV series version of THE CROW, which is about to be released on DVD. It’s fascinating stuff (what’s even more fascinating is that he saved his business card):

What do you do when the incredibly violent film you are asked to adapt to a TV audience is based on cruelty, and the main character is driven by a thirst for revenge?

My answer? You expand the premise to fully explore the nature of life after death, and you change the character quest from revenge to redemption.

And how do you handle the fact that the cult film was made infamous by the horrible on-set death of its star, Brandon Lee?

That was a tougher question because the idea behind the TV series was to use the Eric Draven character, the one who’d been in the comics and that Brandon Lee had played. My take was that, tragic as Lee’s death was, George Reeves’ tragic death did not prevent Christopher Reeve or Dean Cain from playing Superman, and that we would just have to proceed and hope that our own version stood intact on its own.