Lee Goldberg

It’s Not ‘CSI’ or ‘Law & Order’…

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Variety reports that Fox has greenlit a one-hour pilot called PRISON BREAK…

“Prison Break” revolves around a man who robs a bank and waits around for the police to arrive, in order to be arrested and sent to prison. Once there, he relies on one of his tattoos — which doubles as a map of the facility — to escape with his brother, a death-row inmate, in tow.

Eventually, the prisoners break free — and it becomes a story about fugitives on the lam.

“It was one of those things where we heard the pitch and said, ‘God, that’s a great idea,’ ” said Fox execexec VP Craig Erwich. “It just feels like a signature Fox show.”

I don’t know if it will be any good, or if it can sustain itself as a series (without becoming another rehash of “The Fugitive”), but at least it’s not another version of CSI or LAW AND ORDER…or a thinly-veiled ripoff of those shows… or yet another series about cops investigating homicides. You have to applaud Fox for being willing to try unconventional formats for series…even though they often stumble after an intriguing pilot (remember JOHN DOE?)

By the way, I worked with Craig Erwich many years ago when he was a devleopment exec at Cannell Productions and I was toiling on a bad syndicated series for the studio called COBRA.

This has to be a prank…

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…otherwise it’s just too pathetic.

Jan alerted me to this. Someone is selling his novel on ebay to any author, that’s right author, who wants a story to tell…starting bid, $100,000. (Click on the photographs at the left to see a sample of his writing and the cover of his manuscript).

My name is Daniel Rice. I live in Dudley Massachusetts. I am a first time writer and have two more chapters to go, to complete my story. It’s fiction, a coming of age story that would be most enjoyed by adults. It’s a fascinating read that I had a couple of english teachers read themselves, telling me that they could not put my book down after the first chapter. It’s filled with suspense, along with fear and anxiety. The story focuses on three 10 year old children, two girls and one boy. The story also focuses in on one of the father’s dealing with nightmares, which are somehow linked to his childhood, past. Everything comes to an end with a absolution and a twist, making sense in a reality way.

Samplewriting

Let me also assure you that this is a story that is fully typed and formatted for print and will probably add up to 450 pages, or so. I also had my family and a couple of english professors read my manuscript, all of them giving me thumbs up on the fascinating thought processing fiction, I put into this

I am throwing out there anyway, to any well known writer that can profit from this! For J.K. Rawlings or Stephen King to buy my manuscript and put there name on it, they can’t lose and neither can I. 150,000 dollars can sure help my family get me out of this apartment we have been living in for 9 years and finally get a house for my three children. A well known author can put my book in print and make over 2 million dollars with ease! We both win this way!

Samplebook2

This is a serious book, one to be reconcile with. It’s emotional and heartfelt story that entertains from beginning, to end. If interested in buying my manuscript and of course if you are, you probably want to read it first, I will give you my address so you can come over and read it for yourself, or I can come to you with the manuscript, so you can read it.

Ebay Auction for Hardcover Rights

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My friend Bill Crider alerted me to this interesting new wrinkle in the world of publishing…

Author Douglas Clegg is auctioning off on ebay limited edition, hardcover rights to his next novel THE ABANDONED, which will be published in paperback by Liesure Books.

This is the first auction for the rights to a limited and/or lettered edition hardcover ever done on eBay with an award-winning novelist who has had novels at such houses as Penguin USA, Berkley/Ace, NAL/Signet, Tor Books, Leisure Books, Pocket Books, Dell Publishing, as well as in the independent presses, such as Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Delirium Press, and Bloodletting Press. It is suggested but not required that bidders be Publishers of a legitimate small or independent press that has published at least one or more signed, limited and/or lettered edition hardcover books.

The listing also includes the contract, which is negotiable. The current bid is $1000. I’m not sure what the point of this exercise is beyond getting a little publicity for his book as yet another ebay oddity.

Balancing Writing & Family

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Author Laurell K. Hamilton ruminates on her blog about the difficulties of balancing writing and family obligations…

I read how Eugene O’Neill, the playwright had his third wife, Carlotta, make sure that no one bothered him in the morning while he worked. No phone, no callers, nothing. Not even if the house were on fire. Everyone went around on tip-toes, speaking in hushed voices. At lunch she was afraid to even move to make her chair squeak for fear of disturbing the man’s concentration. She also sorted his mail, which frankly is a fine idea, but the rest . . . Yeah, it’s occasionally appealing to be that protected from the world. But how would it possibly work? What, I have a nanny to tend my daughter and never see her? You just give up your entire life to other people, and care only about the writing?

There are other writers that did similar things. Asimov worked an average of twenty hours a day, and supposedly never left his office during a work session. His wife brought him food. There are numerous other stories about writers that did that. Most, if not all of them, male, but I don’t see how it would work. I mean was O’Neill not told if his mother was ill, if he was in the middle of a play? Did he only learn of it afterwards? Was he that protected? Or did emergencies disturb the great man’s schedule? But what, I’m not going to greet my daughter home from the first day of third grade? I’m going to miss that? I don’t think so.

My husband and I were both there huddled under an umbrella in the unusually cold down pour, when she got off the bus for the first day of third grade.

I don’t know how to balance real life with the writing. I really don’t. But I just don’t think I could isolate myself to the degree that some have done and be happy with the decision. It would be as if the writing were more real than your life. How weird would that be? Also, truthfully, the thought of making everyone tip-toe around and whisper because I was working is a little too primadonna for me. I would feel silly asking my family and friends to do stuff like that. But hey, that’s just me. Eugene O’Neill was the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. He won four Pulitzer prizes for drama. Some scholars claim that he’s the third most widely translated and produced dramatist after William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. Not bad, not bad at all.

It’s a problem we all face. I know I do. I work all day on MISSING… and then I chme home at night and work on my DIAGNOSIS MURDER novels. I also squeeze in booksignings here and elsewhere (like Bouchercon or Left Coast Crime). But at the same time, I want to help my daughter with her homework, see her soccer games, take her to karate practice… and just hang out. Managing time is a daily problem for me…and, I suspect, all writers.

Reformed Fanfic Writer Speaks Out

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James Winter, a reformed fanfic writer, speaks his mind about his former pursuit on his blog

Why does anyone who does write fanfic bother writing the creator or writer of their favorite series to whine incessantly about rendering their creations irrelavant?

When you read crap like that or get letters like Lee gets, is it any wonder why people think science fiction fans are losers living in their parents’ basements and having trouble holding real jobs? When people send letters to writers and producers demanding they adhere to insipid story categories (ie – formulas) like hurt/comfort or slash (wtf!?!?!?!), how can you not understand why they get monumentally pissed off?

To the writers and producers, I say look, it’s just grafitti. Treat it as such. The problem is that the people who write fanfic seem to believe they’re writing the next Great Gatsby.

The thing about grafitti, Jim, is when someone puts it on the wall of your house or around your community, you paint over it… because it’s a violation of private property, it’s ugly and it ruins the neighborhood.

The Mail I Get — Fanfic, again

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I got this email from someone this morning on the DorothyL list…

Lee Goldberg wrote: How is appropriating an author’s characters “praising” his ideas? In fact, you’re doing the exact opposite… you’re showing your lack of respect for their ownership of their own creations by stealing them. Unless the author says you may use his characters, fanfic is indefensible.

Lee, have you quite finished? I gather you are quite something in TV over there. As a poor limey I’m afraid I’m not familiar with your work altough I had a look at your impressive CV on IMdB. You’re very lucky, you’ve got to places others can only dream of. Instead, they strive towards their dream by emulating their idols. Notice that they don’t emulate what they don’t like. There’s a convention amongst pioneering climbers that they leave their pitons in place to help those who follow. You are like a mountaineer who, having conquered the mountain, surrounds it with barbed wire to stop anybody else from following. I wonder if you were bitten by a fanfic when you were a child – your reaction is so out of proportion.

Rosie

I don’t see how allowing other people to write about your characters is “leaving pitons in place to help those who follow.” I’m not against “fanfic” because I don’t want other writers to succeed. Quite the opposite. I want to encourage them to write original work that showcases their unique talent and creativity. That’s how they will succeed. Encouraging young writers to steal someone else’s intellectual property isn’t helping them learn their craft… it’s hurting them.

Spanked for Fanfic Rant

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I raised the ire of the DorothyL moderator, Diane Kovacs, for the following exchange about fanfic which, as those of you who read my blog know, is one of my pet peeves. She sent me a warning saying she didn’t appreciate my comments and is now reviewing all my posts for appropriateness before deciding whether add them to the digest. Here are the exchanges that upset her (I’ve cobbled them together into one long post here). You be the judge. The first one, by the way, is a response to a comment of hers…

But, most of the fan fiction I’ve read is written for joy/practice/praise/ or because we want more of that author’s ideas.

How is appropriating an author’s characters “praising” his ideas? In fact, you’re doing the exact opposite… you’re showing your lack of respect for their ownership of their own creations by stealing them. Unless the author says you may use his characters, fanfic is indefensible.

I thought David Klass’s screenplay of James Patterson’s Kiss The Girls was much better than the novel. Stanley Kubrick made the Shining a classic movie even though Stephen King hated it and re-did it in 1997 which by all accounts was a ho-hum

As I’ve said before, there is a big difference between being hired to adapt an author’s work for another medium and stealing his characters for original “fanfic.” With an adaptation, the author is compensated for his work and has given his permission for its use in TV or film. There is no comparison between this and the odious practice of “fanfic.”

In the case of television, the way you get an assignment is to write a spec script… a sample episode of a series (We go into great detail about this in my book, Successful Television Writing… and what seperates a good spec from “fanfic”). Aspiring television writers (or should I say “pre-produced” ??)
need to write a spec episode because that’s how you audition. You have to show the writer/creator of a series that you can capture the voice of his characters and the tone of his show. The only people who sees these scripts are agents and producers.

Again, there is no comparison between this and “fanfic.” For one thing, they are entirely different mediums. And for another, you write a spec episodic script with the permission of the creators of the work for the sole purpose of obtaining an episodic assignment.

And exactly how many of Shakespeare’s plots were original?

Jim, you’re not REALLY comparing Shakespeare’s plays to “Babylon-5” fanfic are you??
You can’t possibily put “Buffy” and “Star Trek” fanfic on the same level with HAMLET. I wouldn’t put them on the same level as Hamburger Hamlet.

There’s good fanfic and there’s bad fan fic. Shakespeare’s stuff is often so good that we don’t even think of it as fanfic.

You know how much I respect you but…. there is no good fanfic. Yes, that’s a blanket statement and I stand by it.

Fanfic is the appropriation of someone else’s characters and using them in a story of your own without the permission of the author. Fanfic is also, by and large, hideous garbage… go to one of those fanfic websites and look at some of that slop, most of which involves characters who aren’t romanticall
involved in the TV series jumping each other’s bones (Spock & Capt. Kirk, Mulder & Scully, etc) or meeting characters from other TV shows and movies (Darth Vader vs the crew of the Enterprise).

Comparing this drivel, the appropriate of TV and movie characters in fan-written stories, to Shakespeare is nonsense.

Under the ground rules we’re discussing here, Laurie King’s wonderful Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novels are fanfic. You can’t say they’re not fanfic just because they happen to be really good.

There’s also a big difference between fanfic and using characters that are in the public domain.
I don’t think we’d be having this discussion if it was about Elvis Cole, Inspector Rebus, or Kinsey Millhone fanfic… you would be as horrified by it as I am. But somehow, this intellectual property theft is okay if we’re talking about TV or movie characters.

There is no difference between Star Trek “fanfic” and Harry Bosch “fanfic.” They are equally wrong and indefensible, in my opinion.

What is happening now is that the fanfic is on the web, unedited and uncritiqued. You can find it easily enough via Google. There are a few conventions where fanfic is available in print format, but most of the venues where fanfic was distributed are gone… as are the fanzines. *sigh*

Good riddance… I wish the same would happen to online fanfic sites, which are disseminating fanfic far wider than fanzines ever did.

I remember, years ago, when I took some writer/producer friends of mine on “Beauty and the Beast” to a science fiction convention and showed them some of the abundant “B&B” fanfic fanzines. To say they were shocked, horrified… and sickened… is an understatement.

If your criterion for condemning fanfic is that it appropriates others’ ideas, then by reduction, that which appropriates others’ ideas is bad.

It’s not the ideas, my friend, it’s appropriating the actual characters, relationships and situations… that’s not just bad, it’s intellectual property theft and copyright infringement in the most blatant sense.

how is fanfic different from me writing #21 in my Brady Coyne series

How would you feel if somebody started writing Brady Coyne fanfic… maybe got him involved in an affair with Harry Bosch. Or decided he was into S&M… and disseminated their version of Brady Coyne on the Internet? I think in that situation, as the creator of Brady Coyne, you’d feel very differently about your comment:

and who’s to say what somebody should and should not write?

Before the exchanges above got Diane upset, a teacher posted that she encouraged her students to write fanfic. So I asked her what she thought her students could possibly learn from the experience:

Teaching them to walk before they can run? Teaching them how to work with a ready-made environment and ready-made characters that they are already familiar with so that they can concentrate on other aspects of technique, like how to write credible dialogue? Teaching them, above
all, the importance of consistency – that they have to be true to those characters?

If my daughter’s teacher used “fanfic” as an approach to teaching creative writing, I’d be enraged… and would not only talk to the teacher about it, but the principal as well. Teaching kids to write by having them use characters from a TV show or a movie doesn’t “teach them to walk before they can run,” it teaches them how to take short cuts, how to devalue another artists’ work, and how not to apply themselves creatively to a project. The “consistency” I want to teach my children doesn’t begin with using someone else’s work… it begins with having faith in your own powers of imagination.

A lot of the people who write fan-fiction scarely get round to reading books

I think that’s obvious… not only from how they write, but what they write. The last thing I would do as a teacher is encourage “fanfic” in any way, shape or form.

Chernuchin’s Book & Pilot Deal

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Variety reports that former LAW & ORDER producer Michael Chernuchin has struck an unusual pilot deal at ABC. Not only has he landed a script order for “Expert Witness,” but a publishing contract, too.

“Expert Witness” is a sort of legal “CSI” that revolves around Roger Cleary, a thirtysomething coroner-turned-professional freelance forensic witness who works for both prosecution and defense cases. Cleary’s dad is in jail for killing his mom, and that crime inspires his career.

Interestingly, even before ABC decides whether to greenlightgreenlight the project to pilot, Chernuchin has already sealed a deal with book packager Alloy to write a series of novels based on the lead character in “Expert Witness.” Indeed, the book deal predated the ABC pactpact.

“We sold the project to TV faster than we thought,” he quipped.

This may be the first time where the “TV tie-in” novel was sold before the TV series. Chernuchin is also adapting the hit BBC series “Judge Deed” for NBC.

“Deed” focuses on a federal court justice in Washington, D.C., who is “totally moral in the courtroom by not so moral on the outside,” Chernuchin said.

“We’ve seen legal stories through almost everyone’s point of view but the judge’s,” he said. “When you see a judge on TV they’re usually just saying ‘sustained’ and ‘overruled.’ This gives me a whole different way to think about cases.”

I guess he doesn’t watch JUDGING AMY, either. And he missed THE COURT, FIRST MONDAY, and QUEENS SUPREME… just like most of America.

Boston Legal

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I loved the last season of THE PRACTICE, which pitted amoral lawyer Alan Shore (James Spader) up against the dull, self-righteous, sanctimonious regular characters who survived David E. Kelley’s big cast purge. The last few episodes introduced William Shatner as pompous, egotistical, and perhaps demented lawyer Denny Crane. The episodes were funny, sharp and surprising. I wish I could say the same about the spin-off, BOSTON LEGAL. What made it work last season was the contrast/conflict between the deadly-serious old PRACTICE characters and Spader, who undercut them at every turn. But in this series, everybody is wacky and broad… there’s no one left for Spader to play off of. And without those “serious” characters to ground things, Shatner’s Denny Crane also loses most, if not all, of his comic punch. That said, I thought critic Robert Lloyd summed up the pleasures of watching Spader & Shatner at work…

Spader’s Alan Shore is a kind of happy, unflappable sociopath — perfect qualities for a trial lawyer, one might say — given to dumb smiles, soft-spoken barbs and an unhurried, deliberate way of moving. Whereas most television characters are constructed and played so that you know exactly what they’re thinking as they think it, and what they’re going to do before they do it, Shore (though you can at least expect him to do the right thing in the wrong way) remains enigmatic. By giving up so little, Spader makes him that much more interesting.

Spader’s appeal is peculiarly nonsexual; his real chemistry here is with Shatner. Indeed, there’s something sort of Kirk and Spock about them — Shatner puffed up like a blowfish, Spader deadpan and not quite of this Earth.

Aged an unbelievable 73, Shatner delivers a typically big performance, but one perfectly appropriate to a character who conceives of himself as larger than life. Yet at the same time, it’s his most modest work ever. Shatner has an unusual ability to play off his own pompousness, which makes him extremely likable, and for all kinds of reasons, not the least of them having to do with one’s memories of earlier Shatners, he is a joy to watch — that certain joy of watching the actor and the character at the same time.

West Hollywood Book Fair

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I spent the day yesterday at the West Hollywood Book Fair and had a great time talking shop with my friends Steve Cannell, Gar Haywood, Ian Ogilvy, Nathan Walpow, Michael Mallory, John Morgan Wilson, Denise Hamilton, Gregg Hurwitz, Bill Fitzhugh, Jerrilyn Farmer, Bob Levinson, Barbara Seranella, Lee Lankford, Gary Phillips, Randy & Jean-Marc Lofficier and Peter Lefcourt.

I also ate a couple of Joanne Fluke’s cookies and talked with lots of mystery fans.

That said, I think I sold a grand total of four books. Most of the other authors I talked to did about as well…or worse. It was strange…the fair was packed, but people just weren’t buying books. Several of the booksellers I talked to were also disappointed.

The only only authors who seemed to draw crowds were Clive Barker and Pamela Anderson’s breasts.