Month: December 2008

More Terminators and Crows

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The fourth TERMINATOR movie, SALVATION,  hasn't even been released yet but Variety reports that a fifth film in the franchise is already in the works for 2011 as the second in an envisioned trilogy. Christian Bale is signed to play John Connor in all three. 

In other franchise news, Variety reports that Stephen Norrington has signed on to write and direct a "reinvention" of THE CROW franchise, which produced four films and one TV series.

For Norrington, “The Crow” deal marks the end of a long screen sabbatical. After making his breakthrough with the Marvel Comics hero “Blade,” Norrington took on a big-budget comic transfer with “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” Neither the director nor his star, Sean Connery, has made a film since. 

[…]“Whereas [director Alex] Proyas’ original was gloriously gothic and stylized, the new movie will be realistic, hard-edged and mysterious, almost documentary-style,” Norrington told Daily Variety.

This and That

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I've been too busy to post the last couple of days. Mostly, I've been plugging away on my latest MONK book. I've taken some time out, though. Yesterday, I watched my daughter Maddie earn her black belt in Tae Kwon Do (yahoo!) and today I attended the MWA-SoCal Christmas party at the Jonathan Club in Santa Monica. While munching on tacos and fajitas, I caught up on the latest happenings with authors Paul Levine, Christa Faust, Les Klinger, and Matt Witten, among many others. The big talk around the tables was the frightening situation for writers in TV and in publishing, the dire circumstances of Borders, and NBC's decision to stop producing scripted programs at 10 p.m on weeknights. Nobody had answers, of course, but there were plenty of worries to share. It's a scary time to be a writer. But it wasn't all doom and gloom. There were plenty of funny anecdotes swapped back-and-forth, stories about new novels and projects people were working on, and the usual gossiping. 

Will the Real Nick Schenk Please Stand Up?

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Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on Nick Schenk, a struggling Minnesota screenwriter who’d sold the first script he’d ever written, GRAN TORINO, to Clint Eastwood, who shot it without changing a word. It was an unlikely, inspiring success story.

The script was so well crafted and understated (and the credits went by so fast) that after seeing the picture, I immediately called Bill Gerber, one of the film’s producers, to find out which one of the many A-list screenwriters who must always be knocking down Eastwood’s door had penned the story.

“Are you sitting down?” Gerber asked. He had quite a surprise. The writer, Nick Schenk, who lives in Minnesota, had never sold a feature script in his life. In fact, the only writing work Schenk had done was for “BoDog Fight,” a mixed martial arts TV show, a game show called “Let’s Bowl” and some comedy sketches collected in a DVD called “Factory Accident Sex.” (“That title doesn’t exactly help my career, does it?” Schenk jokes.)
Schenk says he wrote the script, using a pen and a pad of paper, sitting at night in a bar called Grumpy’s in northeast Minneapolis.

But in today’s Daily Variety, Schenk tells a very different story.

Nick Schenk sold the first script he ever wrote. “It went to Disney and, not to date myself, but Katzenberg greenlit that thing, and when he went to Dreamworks it died that day. They had a director and it was cast — the whole works.” TV gigs and spec scripts followed.

So what’s the real story?

Final Chapter for Books?

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The New Yorker paints a bleak picture of publishing today. Borders is facing bankruptcy. There have been massive firings at Random House and its subsidiaries. Simon and Schuster cut thirty-five jobs, Thomas Nelson cut 54. Harcourt halted acquisitions of new manuscripts, and Penguin froze salaries for anyone making $50,000 or more. More bloodshed and consolidation is certainly on the way, even at smaller houses. The article included this quote from an editor at Farrar Straus Giroux:

We’re privately owned and not quite as massive as houses like Random House. We’ve definitely been feeling the burn with shorter print runs and a tightening on what we can buy, and we’ve had some really bleak editorial meetings.

Bad News for Writers, Actors, Directors…

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NBC is handing over the 10 p.m. hour, five-nights-a-week, to a talkshow hosted by Jay Leno. That's very bad news for guys like me who write episodic dramas. As Variety reports:

With 10 p.m. now filled by Leno – not to mention Sunday Night Football consuming four hours on Sunday and repeats on Saturday – NBC may program as few as ten hours of traditional primetime fare next fall. With some of those hours likely to be reality shows, there's not much room left for scripted fare.

[…]"What does this mean to my show?" asked one NBC exec producer almost
immediately after word of the Leno move leaked. Indeed, some shows may
wind up with shorter orders than the traditional 22 episode season, as
Peacock's needs may be less.

With cheap reality shows taking up more and more primetime real estate, and with writing staffs on dramas shrinking to cut costs, it's getting harder and harder for veteran TV writers to make a living…or for newcomers to break in.

Mr. Monk at the Roundtable

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Tracy Farnsworth at Roundtable Review gives MR. MONK IS MISERABLE a thumbs-up. She writes, in part:

Fans of the show are in for a treat. […]Goldberg does a stunning job capturing Natalie's voice. If you are missing the show between new episodes, the books are just as good, if not better. In fact, I have my fingers crossed that producers consider televising this latest novel. It has some excellent Monk moments!

Thank you, Tracy! I'm afraid that it's very unlikely that this book will be adapted for the show. The series is set in San Francisco and shot in Los Angeles on a very tight budget. Just going to Pasadena is a pricey proposition for them. It's also the series' final season so I think that Paris, Germany and Hawaii, the settings for three of my seven Monk books, are definitely out of their reach.

The book also gets a positive nod from the And Then I Read blog, which gives it 8 1/2 stars out of 10. I like this observation from the review:

I must confess, I love it when Adrian Monk is out of his milieu, but let's face it, Monk is out of his milieu five steps outside the front door of his apartment.

That is so true, which is what makes it so much fun for me when I take him somewhere he has never been before,  whether it's Hawaii or a science fiction convention.

Bad Weather

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Let me start by saying, once again, that I consider myself a Robert B. Parker fan. When he's on his game, there's nobody better.

But ROUGH WEATHER is, by far, the worst Spenser novel yet. It's not the worst book Parker has ever written, but it's pretty close to it.  

The story kicks off with Spenser and Susan attending a wedding on a private island that turns into a violent kidnapping. Not a bad teaser into the story, except that neither Spenser, Susan, nor anyone else seems to react much to the extreme violence that they witness. From that point on, the story becomes almost entirely expositional, falling into a pattern that goes something like this:

1) Something happens, though the "something" is usually just a dull, expositional conversation between Spenser and someone else (and if it's a woman, she'd desperately like to sleep with him but he declines).
2) Spenser tells someone else about what happened.
3) Spenser tells someone else about what happened.
4) Spenser discusses what happened again with someone else, or with a group of people.
5) Spenser has another conversation with someone.
6) repeat scenes 2, 3 and 4.
7) Someone tries to beat up Spenser, but the someone is woefully ill-suited for the task and Spenser casually kicks his ass.
7) Repeat scenes 2, 3 and 4.
8) Someone tries to kill Spenser, but Spenser easily kills them first and/or takes prisoners.
9) repeat scenes 2, 3 and 4, and then repeat them again for good measure, since someone got killed or captured.

There are two set pieces — the kidnapping and an attempt on Spenser's life — and the rest is flat exposition. There's more sitting around and talking in this book than in a Nero Wolfe. The plot is obvious, there isn't a single surprise or twist.  The book ended abruptly with the bad guy coming in and simply telling Spenser what we, the readers, have already guessed a dozen chapters earlier. It's like Parker just got tired of writing and arbitrarily decided to stop.

Spenser doesn't actually have to get out from behind his desk in the finale, which is yet another scene of people sitting around and telling us what we already know. Spenser doesn't do anything, or really solve anything. The one benefit is that the book is short, maybe only 35,000 words, if that, so just when you're thinking about giving up, it's already over.

I think this is going to be my last Spenser novel. Parker is a very frustrating author. At times he's great (check out APPALOOSA, DOUBLE PLAY, the early Spensers and the early Jesse Stones) but lately, with the exception of his westerns, he just seems to type. 

I honestly believe if anybody besides an author of Parker's stature and success had turned in a book to an editor as sloppy, dull, and thin as ROUGH WEATHER, it never would have been published.

Beverly Garland

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Actress Beverly Garland died today. She guest-starred on a DIAGNOSIS MURDER episode that Bill Rabkin and I wrote that brought back Mike Connors as Joe Mannix. Connors was quoted in her Los Angeles Times obituary:

"Not only was she a terrific actress, she was one of
those special gals who was fun to work with," said Mike Connors, who
appeared with Garland in director Roger Corman's low-budget 1955 film
"Swamp Women" and later worked with her when she made guest appearances
on his TV detective series "Mannix."

"She had a great sense of humor,
she was very thoughtful and had a great laugh," Connors said. "You
couldn't help but laugh with her when she laughed."

Garland guest-starred in the 25-year-old MANNIX episode that we were using for flashbacks and reprised the same character in our DIAGNOSIS MURDER episode.

I remember calling her and telling her about what we had in mind. She remembered the MANNIX episode, and the character, very fondly — which was amazing, considering the 100s of  TV guest-shots she'd done in her career. She was very exciting about the chance to reprise a character that she'd played so long ago.

We sent her over a tape of the MANNIX episode and when she showed up on set the first day — an apartment in West Los Angeles — she had the character and her accent down cold. It was uncanny…as if she'd played it just yesterday instead of twenty five years earlier. 

She seemed to have a great time, particularly between shots when she was talking about the old days with Connors and Dick Van Dyke. For me, a true TV geek, it was one wonderful just to be able to sit there and listen to their conversation, prodding it along every now and then with a question.

I'm glad I had a chance to meet her and work with her.