For all of you dreaming of becoming the next John Grisham or Alice Sebold with your first novel, here’s a jolt of reality: UK author Amanda Mann posts the details of her latest royalty statement and it’s sobering. And the performance of her first two books is far more typical than you might think. (Thanks to Lynn Viehl for the heads-up)
Books
Temperance Brennan Comes to TV
TVTracker reports that FOX has picked up a series version of Kathy Reichs’ Temperance Brennan novels… in a way. The series is actually a blend of the books and the true story of Reichs herself who, like her heroine, as a forensic anthropologist. There have also been a few other creative tweaks made by writer/producer Hart Hanson. Here’s the logline from TVTracker:
Network: FOX
Genre: Drama
Title: BONES
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Television
Commitment: Series Pick Up (13 Episodes)
Auspices: Hart Hanson
(EP, W-Pilot), Barry Josephson (EP N/W), Kathy Reichs (EP N/W), Greg Yaitanes
(D-Pilot)
Cast: Jonathan Adams, David Boreanaz, Michaela Conlin, Emily
Deschanel, Eric Millegan, TJ Thyne
Logline: When law enforcement calls upon Dr. Temperance Brennan and her team of scientists to assist with murder investigations, she often finds herself teamed with Special Agent Seeley Booth, a former Army sniper whose mistrust of science and scientists leads them to clash both professionally and personally while solving the toughest cases in the
new one-hour drama BONES.
Hey-o Kayo
In my travels up in San Francisco, I made sure to pay a visit to Kayo Books, a treasure trove of noir classics and not-so-classics, where I once again went on a buying binge, stocking up on more Harry Whittington, Marvin Albert, and Wade Miller paperbacks. They also have a huge stock of sleazy sex books and TV tie-ins. If you’re in SF, and you’re a book lover, you’ve got to stop by.
I also browsed at Stacy’s on Market Street (where I got a signed copy of Kevin Guilfoile’s CAST OF SHADOWS), A Clean Well Light Place For Books on Van Ness (where I got a signed first edition of Isabel Allende’s new ZORRO and ordered a signed copy of Martha O’Connor’s BITCH POSSE) and Barnes & Noble at Fisherman’s Wharf (where I found a signed copy of Elizabeth George’s WITH NO ONE AS WITNESS and Jodi Picoult’s VANISHING ACTS).
Meet The Saint
On Saturday, May 21st, at 1 pm my friend Ian Ogilvy will be visiting the Mystery Book Store in Westwood to sign his children’sbook MEASLE AND THE DRAGODON, his sequel to the delightful MEASLE AND THE WRATHMONK (one of my daughter’s favorite books). Ian has made a name for himself lately as a novelist in the UK for writing clever novels for adults and children, but he is probably best known as the actor who played Simon Templar in the series RETURN OF THE SAINT(he also guest-starred in a couple very funny DIAGNOSIS MURDER episodes, including the one where Regis gunned down Kathy Lee). So if you’re in the neighborhood, be sure to stop by and say hi… and get a book signed.
Location Scouting
It’s getting "down to the wire" on the deadline for my first MONK novel, MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIRE HOUSE, which is due June 1. I’m not going to have a problem delivering the book on time, though I hope I never have to write a book in eight weeks again. (I’ve got 3 1/2 months to write my second MONK novel)
I’m up in San Francisco today, where MONK is set, though it has been shot in Toronto and, for the last season or two, in Santa Clarita, California. I figured it was time I got to know the city a little
better. Even though I am from the Bay Area (born in Oakland, raised in Walnut Creek), I am not as familiar with SF as I’d
like to be…or need to be… if I am going to create any sense of place in these
MONK books.
I haven’t had to make a conscious effort to get to know a city for a book since THE WALK, my novel about a guy who walks across L.A. after the Big One hits. The DIAGNOSIS MURDER books take place, for the most part, in L.A. Since I live in L.A. , describing the city and neighborhoods comes easily, since I know the city well. Even so, I’ve also got a bunch of L.A. architecture and history books and travel guides to use for research when necesary…and occasionally have to drive some where and take some pictures to add more texture to the writing.
Although I’ve been back to SF maybe thirty times in the last, say, ten years, the problem is I always go to the same parts of the city every time (mostly the tourist spots at that). I’m making a big effort over the next two days to visit neighborhoods I haven’t been to in years or am unfamiliar with…and to take lots of pictures. In doing so, I’m discovering a whole new San Francisco. I’m also picking up lots of books on SF while I’m here for research and to refresh my memory.
It’s fun, though I’m painfully aware that hours spent on the streets are hours not spent at the laptop writing…
EBooks & CGI Covers
I was reading my sister-in-law Wendy’s blog and noticed she’s reading "Heather’s Gift," an e-book from ebook publisher Ellora’s Cave, which seems to specialize in erotic romance. 
But just because a book is published "electronically," do the covers also have to be CGI as well? Without reading a word, the covers imply that the writing will be as synthetic as the "people" on the covers. 
There’s something very unappealing about reading books about CGI characters having CGI sex…sort of the literary equivalent of an x-rated computer game.
Now to be fair to Ellora and her cave, I haven’t read any of the books and there are some covers that use actual models, or have artwork that actually resemble genuine human beings…
(Click on the covers for larger images).
Perdue vs. Brown
The lawsuit against Dan Brown, filed by author Lewis Perdue (my old journalism advisor at UCLA), is moving forward. The New York Times reports that the judge in the copyright infringement case is reading Brown’s THE DAVINCI CODE and Lew’s DAUGHTER OF GOD and THE DAVINCI LEGACY to
determine if they are "substantially similar" and if the suit should be allowed to proceed.
Judge George B. Daniels, of the United States District Court for the Southern
District of New York, gave himself the assignment after lawyers representing Mr.
Brown and Mr. Perdue urged him to read the entire works rather than rely on the
excerpts in their court filings, which detail scores of similarities and
differences between the books. Judge Daniels said he would make a decision on
the suit in 30 to 60 days.
Shortly after "The Da Vinci Code" was published in early 2003, Mr. Perdue
asserted that the novel improperly drew on two of his earlier novels, "Daughter
of God," published in 2000, and "The Da Vinci Legacy," published in 1983 and
released in a new paperback edition last year.Although Mr. Perdue had threatened to sue then, Mr. Brown and Random House,
the parent of Doubleday, the publisher of "The Da Vinci Code," first filed suit
over the matter. Last September, they asked the federal court in Manhattan for a
declaratory judgment that Mr. Brown’s book did not infringe on Mr. Perdue’s
copyright.Mr. Perdue countersued, charging Mr. Brown and Random House with copyright
infringement and adding as parties to the suit the Sony Pictures and Columbia
Pictures divisions that are producing a film of "The Da Vinci Code." Mr.
Perdue’s court filings state that he has suffered damages "believed to be in
excess of $150 million."
Lew talks about the ruling (and charts the entire legal process as it goes on) on his DaVinci Crock blog. His observations include:
The most significant missed story in court on May 6, was the Random House
attorney’s concession — for the sake of the arguments in this case — that Dan
Brown had access to my works. They have consistently argued that access
was lacking, that Dan Brown never heard of me or my books
Expect a ruling in the next month or two.
An Email I’m Not Going to Answer
I got his creepy email from The Netherlands today:
Hello mr. Goldberg,
How do you do? i’m not so fine.
Iám a big fan of diagnosis murder and also from the familly van Dyke, but i
don’t no how to write with them, i mis them very much. I hope that i can see
them some time, that’s my dream and it allways will be, because we haven’t no
money to come to America to find them.Please could you help me? I hope so,’you are my last change.
Flying Without a Pilot
TV Writer Paul Guyot tells all about the demise of his TNT pilot THE DARK, which he wrote and produced with Stephen J. Cannell and that was directed by Walter Hill. So what went wrong?
Who knows what happened – you can speculate and Monday morning
quarterback forever – but the bottom line was once the thing was shot,
edited and presented to the network, the original script and story just
wasn’t there. The first thing the network said when they saw the cut was "Where’s the script we bought?"Now, I’m not saying it was awful. I don’t love the finished product,
but I will say that, overall, I’m happy with about 70% of it. These
days that’s not a bad percentage. But it was that other third that
killed us.
A few years ago, we shot a two-hour, back-door pilot on DIAGNOSIS MURDER starring Fred Dryer as the Chief of Police of Los Angeles. The co-star was an unknown actor named Neal McDonough, who has since gone on to star in BAND OF BROTHERS, BOOMTOWN and MEDICAL INVESTIGATIONS (as well as a three-episode arc on MARTIAL LAW for us). The pilot was called THE CHIEF.
Since DIAGNOSIS MURDER was, itself, a spin-off of JAKE AND THE FATMAN (which itself was a spin-off of MATLOCK), Fred Silverman demanded that we do at least one pilot per season imbedded in an episode of the show.
This is a cheap way to make a pilot and allows the studio an opportunity to recoup their costs in syndication. You also go straight to film without all the intermediate steps in the development process. The other advantage is that the pilot will air and the ratings, if they are high enough, can be a valuable sales tool.
The downside is that backdoor pilots-as-episodes have a much harder time being taken seriously at the network because they usually aren’t developed through the usual channels and, therefore, there’s no one championing them internally at the network. (Of course lots of pilot-as-episodes have sold… CSI:MIAMI and MORK AND MINDY are a few such examples, my book UNSOLD TELEVISION PILOTS is littered with others that haven’t, like ASSIGNMENT EARTH from STAR TREK and LUTHOR GILLIS form MAGNUM PI)
THE CHIEF had a lot going for it. For one thing, we had Fred Dryer, a proven star with HUNTER and this role was absolutely perfect for him (and I have to say, he was great in it). For another, the two-hour pilot aired during sweeps and got fantastic ratings, ranking something like #14 for the week, a tremendous accomplishment for us. And finally, we tested the show with audiences at ASI and the scores were amazing, among the best our partner Fred Silverman (former head of ABC, CBS and NBC) had ever seen. We were sure we had a slam-dunk sale at CBS…and if they were foolish enough to pass on it, we definitely land at another next network. Little did we know…
We met with Les Moonves at CBS…and he passed. He didn’t want to work with Fred Dryer. We met with Jaime Tarses at ABC. She didn’t want to work with Dryer. We met with Dean Valentine at UPN. He didn’t want to work with Dryer. And so it went at every network. What killed us wasn’t the execution, the concept, the acting, the ratings, or the testing. What killed us was bad blood between Dryer and execs he’d worked with before on other projects. Basically, we were victims of the burned bridges Dryer had left in his wake. The television audience loved Fred Dryer, but the major network execs didn’t. Had we known that going in, we would have cast someone else as THE CHIEF. Then again, we might not have enjoyed the same terrific ratings and sky-high testing…not that they did us any good in the end. (Ironically, CBS ended up doing a similar show with Craig T. Nelson
called THE DISTRICT. And from what I hear, Nelson was no picnic)
I’ve since had another experience like that with another star which is why, from now on, we call around about the actors we’re thinking about working with so we aren’t derailed from the get-go by burned bridges or a history of "difficult behavior on the set.
(You can read the two-part pilot script here and here or watch a five minute sales presentation culled from the two-hour movie here, just go to THE CHIEF logo and click on it).
The Thought Police
CBS News reports that some neanderthal lawmaker in Alabama has introduced a bill that would ban all books from public school libraries by gay authors or about gay characters.
"I don’t look at it as censorship," says Republican State Representative
Gerald Allen. "I look at it as protecting the hearts and souls and minds of
our children."Books by any gay author would have to go: Tennessee
Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Alice Walker’s novel "The Color
Purple" has lesbian characters.Allen originally wanted to ban even some
Shakespeare. After criticism, he narrowed his bill to exempt the classics,
although he still can’t define what a classic is. Also exempted now
Alabama’s public and college libraries.Librarian Donna Schremser fears
the "thought police," would be patrolling her shelves."And so the
idea that we would have a pristine collection that represents one political
view, one religioius view, that’s not a library,” says Schremser."I
think it’s an absolutely absurd bill," says Mark Potok of the Southern
Poverty Law Center.First Amendment advocates say the ban clearly
does amount to censorship."It’s a Nazi book burning," says Potok. "You
know, it’s a remarkable piece of work."But in book after book, Allen
reads what he calls the "homosexual agenda," and he’s alarmed."It’s
not healthy for America, it doesn’t fit what we stand for," says Allen. "And
they will do whatever it takes to reach their goal."He says he sees this
as a line in the sand.