#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
Lee Goldberg My cousin Danny Barer pointed me to this very funny ebay listing for a pair of leather pants.
You are bidding on a mistake.
We all make mistakes. We date the wrong people for too long. We chew
gum with our mouths open. We say inappropriate things in front of
grandma.And we buy leather pants.
There’s more, and it gets every funnier.
I’ve often wondered who the heck was reading V-LIFE. Now I know: nobody. Variety has announced that they are killing the two-year-old magazine in February, but the name will live on Fridays in a special section of Daily Variety. Rumor has it Colonial Fan Force will immediately mount a campaign demanding that V-LIFE be brought back in its original format with its original staff.
There are a couple shows I enjoy listening to sporadically on the weekends when I’m ferrying my ten-year-old daughter around to all her soccer games, tae kwon do classes and play dates.
Michael Feldman is, in my view, the radio equivalent of David Letterman or Conan O’Brien. His exuberant NPR program WHAT DO YOU KNOW? is a talkshow/game show but it’s really just a forum for him to make jokes about the news and, when the show travels, whatever city or state he happens to be visiting that week. It’s a very funny, often hilarious show. It’s apparently been on the air for over a decade, but seems to generate absolutely no buzz.
I also like to catch Peter Sagal’s WAIT WAIT DON’T TELL ME, another NPR game show, which is just an excuse to make jokes about current events. The show is uneven, depending a great deal on how sharp the panelists are as they make jokes during a variety of simple news quizzes, during which phone-in listeners vie for the chance to have NPR announcer Carl Kasell record a message on their telephone answering machines. Most weeks you can find Paula Poundstone among the group (thus answering the trivia question "whatever happened to Paula Poundstone?"), and she seems to bring out the best in the panel, which usually includes Roy Blount Jr, PJ O’Rourke, Adam Felber, and Sue Ellicott. Like WHAT DO YOU KNOW, this show also seems to exist below the pop culture radar.
Then again, they’re both on the radio…and who listens to radio any more?
It’s official now —Variety reports that Daniel Craig is the new James Bond. And although director Martin Campbell ("GoldenEye") promises a tougher, grittier Bond, they couldn’t resist introducing Craig to the press by having him arrive by speedboat wearing a Brioni suit. Seems more Brosnan than Connery, doesn’t it?
"Casino Royale" examines Bond’s formative years with Campbell set to chart
the character’s "tough arc" and establish to auds how 007 developed his penchant
for Aston Martins, Martinis and beautiful women. Other script details include news that there will be no Moneypenny or Q
characters in this film.
Many thanks to Sarah Weinman at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind for making my new book THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE a "pick of the week".
This book is getting a ton of
review attention and it’s easy to see why: on the surface, it’s a classic
wish-fulfillment tale, but the substance that lies beneath is what elevates
Goldberg’s novel into a thoughtful, sometimes sweet and always engaging look at
what it takes to grow from a boy to a man. In a way, I see why it took so long
to reach readers: many other writers would need another 100 pages to tell the
same story, but credit to the author for putting it across without a wasted
word.
Paul Guyot talks about why he never leaves behind a "leave behind" when pitching a pilot. I’ve heard both sides of the argument.
LEAVE THEM NOTHING. No treatment, no "Leave behind." I firmly
believe that you greatly reduce your chances of a sale when you leave
them something that they can pick apart and overanalyze.The idea of leaving them with something is archaic. That was the
way things were twenty years ago, but not now. And the reason so many
[Aspring Writers] think they should do this is because they’re reading books and
taking classes from writers who haven’t worked in TV in ten or twenty
years.
Frankly, I’ve always left a leave-behind. I guess that makes me a dinosaur — or it explains why I haven’t sold a pilot yet this season. I’ve got another pitch coming up, maybe I’ll try it Paul’s way this time…
Over the last 24 hours, thirty people have run searches for "Lee Goldberg" on various search engines that have brought them here, looking for…what? Why the sudden interest in me? Is it me you’re looking for or him? If you’re one of those explorers in search of "Lee Goldberg," please tell me what your interest in me is…or in someone else with my name. I’m dying of curiosity…
It’s stories like this from BookStandard.com that give self-published authors the motivation to keep writing those checks:
Touchstone Fireside, a division of Simon & Schuster, has
paid a six-figure sum for the publishing rights to Pamela Aidan’s Jane
Austen–inspired trilogy “Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman.” The first two books,
An Assembly Such as This and Duty and Desire, have sold some
40,000 copies through Aidan’s website—initially in digital form and then as
print-on-demand titles—according to Amanda Patten, a senior editor at
Touchstone, who acquired the book from Lloyd Jassin, of the law firm The Jassin
Office. (The third title in the trilogy, These Three Remain, is available
this month, according to the website Austenesque.)“The idea is to hit an audience outside of this world of Jane Austen fans, who
discovered Pamela through a ring of Austen websites,” said Patten, who added
that the strength of the books’ print-on-demand sales made the deal especially
attractive.
This is the one-in-a-million success story that drives the unrealistic hopes of most self-published POD authors. Those aspiring authors miss this important fact: Aiden didn’t attract a publisher until she’d sold 40,000 copies of her book, well over 100 times more copies than most self-published titles will ever sell. And even with those sales, she still opted to go with a traditional publishing house rather than continue her POD self-publishing efforts. Why? For the money, ofcourse, as well as the wider distribution, publicity, and brick-and-mortar sales a traditional publisher offers.
For all the talk about the "advantages" of self-publishing from vanity press novelists, the fact remains, not matter how much they say otherwise, that attracting a traditional publisher is still their ultimate goal.
Media critic Herbie J. Pilato, author of books about the TV series KUNG FU and BEWITCHED, does a very good job dissecting what went wrong with SEAQUEST. In short, just about everything:
The changes were manic. Too much to swallow. SeaQuest suffocated in a sea of too
many ideas. Too many DeLouises from one Dom. It reached for whatever might keep
it above water. It’s like someone unplugged the cork at the center of the sub.
It sunk. No one paid attention to the simplest, yet most essential answer: they
should have bailed out, as soon as possible."SeaQuest will not be remembered as a television classic," Goldberg concludes
" It will be
remembered technically as a ground-breaking show for computer animation, and
creatively as a hugely expensive mistake."
I got this email today:
Hello. How do you show flashbacks/dreams in teleplays – and transition out of?
I’m specifically referring to "Cold Case" – a show that’s full of scenes where
the characters relive stories from the past. Thank you very much.
I haven’t seen a COLD CASE script, so I don’t know how they do it, but there are many different ways. Here’s one approach:
EXT. HOUSE – DAY
Mark stood in front of the ramschakle house, the windows broken, the lawn choked with weeds. And as we PUSH IN on Mark’s eyes, we CUT TO:
EXT. HOUSE – DAY (FLASHBACK)
as it looked on the day he moved in, fresh paint, manicured lawn, flowers in bloom. The colors are so outrageously vivid, it’s a tough call whether what we’re seeing is the way it really was, or the past as romanticized in Mark’s mind. We END THE FLASHBACK and GO:
EXT. HOUSE – BACK TO SCENE
Mark shakes himself out of his reverie and goes inside the abandoned home.