Lee Goldberg

The Mail I Get

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I got an email this evening from a woman who was offended by an off-hand opinion expressed by Natalie in MR. MONK IN OUTER SPACE:

There was a part where
Natalie describes listening to NPR, getting a dose of “left-leaning
news” and “liberal commentary.” NPR is a nonpartisan organization that
offers only the facts when delivering news updates. I mean, nothing
personal, but I dont like reading Natalie’s thoughts about anything,
but that was pretty outrageous. I get so frustrated because I really
like Monk but the fact that that was said, I don’t know if I can
continue reading them. Why can’t the book be in the third person?

Of all the things someone could be offended by in the book, I never would have picked the comment about NPR. I thought of a lot of smart-ass replies, but instead I wrote:

I’m a big fan of NPR, too, and I
contribute money each year to my local NPR station, but surely you know
as well as I do that the network is widely perceived as having a
liberal slant. Whether it is true or not, it’s a perception that
Natalie happens to share. It’s a shame that you don’t like hearing Natalie’s thoughts because I intend to continue writing the books in her voice.

 


More MAPES

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Orson ossoman as Mapes 
I’ve had some very nice emails today from people who attended the International Mystery Writers Festival in Owensboro, Kentucky and enjoyed my play, MAPES FOR HIRE. I also stumbled on a blog by Tony Brewer, who led the foley team who did most of the live sound FX for the “radio” plays. He writes:

I love doing sound effects, especially live, and boy did this project
stretch me. I think I commented elsewhere: 8 shows, 34 performances, 10
days, with a little over a week of real-time face-to-face onstage prep
and rehearsal. Damn.

But what made this so rewarding was the
talent involved. From the seasoned audio producers, to the pros in the
sound booth, to the versatile actors, to the great writing, add me to
the mix and you’ve got a unique, hybrid theatre experience. A little
bit old-time radio, a little black box, plus 3 of the shows were
screenplays adapted for live performance — basically movies performed
live — all done on a shoestring.


Amy Walker co-starred in MAPES FOR HIRE as Carol and you can get a glimpse of her amazing range in her YouTube video “21 Accents,”which went viral on Break.com earning over three million views.

(The picture on the left, taken by Bryan Leazenby, is Orson Ossman performing as Harvey Mapes)

Defend the Defenders

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Dawn O’Bryan-Lamb has established the Author Advocate Defense Fund  to help the bloggers, web sites, and organizations being sued by literary agent Barbara Bauer:

“On September 20,
2007, Barbara Bauer filed suit in New Jersey against a list of
defendants, ranging from the Wikipedia Foundation, to message board
owners, to bloggers.

More information about the precipitating events can be found in the archives of Making Light. There is additional information about the case regarding Wikipedia at the Electronic Frontier Foundation site. 

 Another defendant is Science Fiction Writers of America for its Writer Beware “thumbs down agencies” or “Twenty Worst” list. Yet another is the former and current owner of  Absolute Write which has a thread about the Plaintiff on their site. 

Defending
oneself against a lawsuit is expensive, and many of the author
advocates being sued could use help to pay the many legal costs
involved, which are adding up over these past 9 months.

I’ve
set up a PayPal site where you can donate to help these writers with
their legal fees. Any amount is welcome. Any fees assessed by PayPal
will be covered, so your full donation goes to the legal defense fund.
All funds will be disbursed directly to the defendant’s attorneys in
equal shares.”


It’s a good cause. I urge you to make a donation.

UPDATE 7-4-08 : Score one for the good guys. Bauer’s lawsuit against Wikipedia has been thrown out by the court. The Ashbury Park Press reports:

Judge Jamie S. Perri dismissed complaints by Barbara Bauer and her
company, Barbara Bauer Literary Agency Inc., against Wikimedia
Foundation, the owner and operator of online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Bauer in court papers alleged that Wikimedia Foundation defamed her by
publishing numerous false statements, including one that said she was
“The Dumbest of the 20 Worst” literary agents and that she had “no
documented sales at all.”

Perri cited the Communications
Decency Act, enacted by Congress in 1996 to promote free speech over
the Internet. The act immunizes a provider of interactive computer
services from liability for publishing content provided by another.

This judgment dealt only with Wikipedia, not the cases brought against the 19 other defendants.

Get your fix of THE FIX

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My brother Tod has posted a link to the first chapter of his new novel BURN NOTICE: THE FIX, which comes out nationwide next month. He also talks about some of the challenges he faced writing the book:

I would be lying if I said writing this book wasn’t a challenge. It
absolutely was. I’ve never written a traditional crime novel. Anyone
who has read my work in the past will tell you that linear storytelling
isn’t exactly my calling card. Nor is having a narrator who is
reliable. Of course I’ve written linear work in the past. And of course
I’ve written reliable narrators in the past. But one thing I don’t
think I’ve ever written is a hero, even an ironic hero like Michael
Westen. My characters tend to be pretty fucked up and of course Michael
is fucked up in his own way, too, but not in the “he may have killed
his wife and daughter” sort of way. The challenge for me was to convey
him on the page in a way that made me enjoy writing him and also was
true to Matt Nix’s creation.

I think it’s the best book my brother has ever written, but hey, I’m biased.

What a Difference Acting Ability Makes

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Many years ago, Michael Mann wrote and directed a flop pilot for NBC called LA TAKEDOWN, starring Scott Plank and Alex MacArthur. The pilot would be a forgotten footnote in Mann’s career if not for the fact that he pulled off an amazing feat — he manged to remake it, almost word-for-word, scene-for-scene, as the big-budget feature film HEAT, starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. This may be the one and only time a busted TV pilot has been remade as a feature film…with hardly any changes. Here is the original “restaurant” scene from LA TAKEDOWN and the same scene in HEAT.  Same words, better actors. What a difference acting ability makes…

Mr. Monk Goes To Germany

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Lohr article0001
 
Today my latest MONK novel, MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY, hits the bookstore shelves nationwide in hardcover. Here’s what it’s about:

Adrian Monk is actually doing well lately. He’s
solving murders as fast as they come, and he’s been noticeably less
compulsive—he doesn’t count his morning Wheat Chex until they’re in the bowl. Progress is progress, and Monk knows he owes it all to his therapist, Dr. Kroger.

So when Dr. Kroger attends a conference in Germany, Monk ends up in
trouble. He can’t tie his shoes, forgets how to swallow, and loses
track of his blinking. Desperate to regain his footing, Monk follows
his shrink to Germany. And that’s where Monk sees the man across a
crowded town square. The man he’s never stopped searching for.

The man with six fingers. The man responsible for his wife’s death.

Or did Monk imagine crossing paths with him?

Now, in a foreign land full of… foreigners, Monk must deal
with his multitude of phobias and contend with an especially unfriendly
polizei department in order to find the six-fingered man. He must also
confront someone who thinks Monk may have just gone officially
insane—his own psychiatrist.

Over the weekend, the book got big play in the newspaper in Lohr, Germany, where much of the story is set (if you can read German, you can see part one of the article here and part two here in PDF format). And the German edition of the book doesn’t even come out until this fall. I wish I could get coverage like that here!Lohr article0003

This and That

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458490967My wife and daughter are in France for a month, so I’m all alone at home…unless you count my daughter’s dog, the hamster and the fish. I feel like a zoo keeper…my life has become BORN FREE in a tract home. But the solitude has given me the chance to catch up on some books and movies, when I’m not cleaning backyards, cages and fish tanks…

 OSS 117: LE CAIRE NID D’ESPIONS

This French spy spoof is everything GET SMART wanted to be and AUSTIN POWERS should have been. It perfectly mimics the look, feel, sound, fashion and acting style of the 1960s spy films down to the smallest, lovingly crafted detail. And on top of that, it’s hilariously funny, too.

 In-bruge_l

IN BRUGES

This a bloody, dark comedy about two hit men who are sent by their boss to chill out in Bruges, Belgium after an assignment goes bad. I loved everything about this film which, in terms of tone and violence, is sort of a cross between PULP FICTION, JACKIE BROWN and SEXY BEAST. I don’t understand why this movie didn’t generate some attention…it’s seemed to open and close in a weekend here in L.A.. It’s a shame, because this may be one of the best movies I’ve seen all year.

WANTED

Sure, the stunts and effects are cool, but this movie left me cold. I just never got into the characters or the story. I found myself glancing at my watch, biding my time until the next stunt. It badly wants to be THE MATRIX or BOURNE IDENTITY, but to me it felt like I was watching a video game instead of an actualPoster1 movie.

SERAPHIM FALLS

A post-Civil War western starring Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson, both of whom were totally miscast.
Not that it mattered. It’s a strange cross between OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, JEREMIAH JOHNSON, and RAMBO, and not a fraction as entertaining or fresh as those movies. Brosnan plays a former Union soldier (who apparently has Navy SEAL survival training) relentlessly pursued through snow-capped mountains and parched deserts by vengeance-seeking former Rebel soldier Neeson. Neither man is a villain or a hero which is, of course, the point of the movie, which is driven home with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. The movie seems tired, familiar, and pointless.

THE GARGOYLE

This isn’t a movie, but rather one of the hot galleys from BookExpo. It’s by first-time author Andrew Davidson and it’s a breath-taking, though problematic, debut. The story falls into what is becoming something of a genre unto itself:  the “wounded man finds redemption and love with the woman who nurses him back to health” and who endures his agony by escaping into a Gargoyle
fantasy world of imagination and flashbacks. The story, as a result, shares some similarities to THE ENGLISH PATIENT, THE SINGING DETECTIVE and THE WATERDANCE, to name a few. Despite some familiar motifs, this is a brilliant, compelling, and darkly funny novel…at least for the first two-thirds. It’s about a coked-up porno actor who is in a terrible car accident that nearly burns him alive. It’s in the burn ward that he meets a woman who is either a schizophrenic or his lover from several past lives. To say more would ruin things. I was enthralled for the first two thirds of the book, as much by the story as the prose. Davidson is a master storyteller, and I don’t say that lightly. I can’t believe this is his first novel. The writing and structure evokes John Irving, Robertson Davies, and Susanna Clarke…with several “side trips” that could stand alone as mini-novellas (something Irving has done in several of his books by having his “author” characters share their stories or by using extended, anecdotal flashbacks). The book fumbles in the finale third, with an extended dream sequence and a limp, pointlessly drawn out conclusion that doesn’t satisfy on any level. It doesn’t matter. That small disappointment is more than outweighed by the brilliance of what precedes it. The characters, images and stories in this amazing book will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading. I strongly recommend it.

Get Smart Isn’t

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I loved the TV series GET SMART and I still do. You could pick any episode from the first three seasons of GET SMART and it would be ten times funnier than Steve Carrell’s new movie version. The GET SMART movie is a listless, laughless remake that makes THE NUDE BOMB, the last GET SMART feature film, look like brilliant comedy. But while I was sitting there, fighting sleep and debating whether to walk out or not, it occurred to me that GET SMART has a lot of the same problems as Steve Martin’s THE PINK PANTHER remake. In both cases, someone made the inept decision to make the bumbling heroes smart and capable…and very good at what they do. Maxwell Smart and Inspector Clouseau were lovable, clueless, idiots who thought they were brilliant at what they did…and were far, far from it. That was what made them so funny. So why change the key aspect of their characters? The two Steves are extraordinarily funny guys — but have their egos become so big they are hesitant about playing morons? That wasn’t a problem for either one of them in the past (see THE JERK or ANCHORMAN).  If they didn’t want to play Maxwell Smart and Inspector Clouseau as we know and love them…then why bother playing the parts at all? They even screwed up the “Would you believe” and “missed it by that much” jokes.

The only thing I liked about the GET SMART movie was the very, very, very in-joke of seeing Carrell use all three of the cars that Maxwell Smart drove in the series opening title sequence (cameos by Bernie Kopell and Leonard Stern seemed awkwardly shoe-horned into the movie). But that one moment was hardly worth the agony of watching the rest of the movie.

The Drama Behind Drama

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Today was the first day of a three-day “International Drama Summit”
conference that MediaXChange, in cooperation with CBS, NATPE and Fox, put
together here in L.A.  A sobering fact came out of a panel discussion today with Jeff
Wachtel, head of USA Network, and David Stapf, head of programming for
CBS and Paramount. They were asked point-blank by David Zucker (who
heads Ridley Scott’s TV production company) if they would ever buy a contemporary TV
series set in Europe or South America, written and produced by
Americans and starring American actors…and they both answered with a flat-out NO.

The only exceptions Stapf and Wachtel said they would consider would be
shows set in the past (ala ROME, THE TUDORS or ROBINSON CRUSOE) or that
are science fiction (which are likely to be set on other planets,
regardless of what country they are shot in).  They believe that
America audiences simply won’t accept a contemporary series set in
Europe, no matter how big the stars are. They said there hasn’t been a
successful network show set in Europe since the days of THE AVENGERS,
THE SAINT and I SPY thirty five years ago…and they were unwilling to be the ones to try to break that record.

(So, if their views reflect those of other American network chiefs, I was doomed on FAST TRACK as a series before I ever started…though the movie has quite done well internationally as a “one off” and made money)

That said, Stapf and Wachtel said they are very open to buying formats from overseas
and setting them in America…as the networks have done in a big way this season LIFE ON MARS, 11th HOUR, MYTHOLOGICAL EX, THE
TREATMENT, and NY-LON, to name a few. The key is adapting the format to what they called our “uniquely American sensibility.” A BBC exec on the panel said the biggest difference was story-telling…he said British programs tend to meander more, “though there is some pleasure to be had in meandering.”

They also talked about how immensely successful U.S. shows are in
Europe and that American studios actively consider the international sales
potential of whatever they are developing for the domestic networks.

There was also a fascinating panel of executives and content providers discussing the potential for drama on the web. Christopher Sandberg, of the Companyp in Sweden, said the key difference between TV and the web comes is how they view the relationship between content and the audiences. In the broadcast model, the important thing is getting the viewer to click his remote to your program and to stay there to watch it. In the web model, it’s not getting the audience to the content that counts, it’s what the audience does when they get there that matters…and that is what is saleable to advertisers. Passive viewing isn’t enough in the new media world. What the web provider is selling advertisers is the audience involvement, and how people are experiencing, interactin with, & utilizing the content…not simply the audience’s eyeballs.

Fascinating stuff.