Current Affairs

The November Man

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I didn’t take long for Pierce Brosnan to try renewing his license to kill. Variety reports that Brosnan is slated to star in THE NOVEMBER MAN, based on the 1986  novel "There Are No Spies" by Bill Granger. The book is actually one of a series featuring a spy named Devereaux, aka The November Man (not to be confused with the 1976  novel "The November Man" by Brian Freemantle)

Sweet Dreams

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A screenwriter in Finland dreamed about me last night.

Lee Goldberg was a
performing magician and was giving a show at a stage somewhere. It was a big
outdoor stage and there was quite a big audience. I was his apprentice. Lee
Goldberg said he was going to do a big trick, but it required the presence of
President George W. Bush.

At least I wasn’t naked… and it didn’t involve me helping the President discover the joys of hot hunky man love.

The Bright Purple Interview

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Mystery File has posted Ed Gorman’s 1980s interview with John D. MacDonald. Here’s one of MacDonald’s quotes:

"Professionally, I do not recall any particularly bad memories.  The book which
just won’t jell.  The editor who gets fired when you have half a book in his
shop.  The clown who was taking my old pulp stories and changing the point of
view and selling them to Manhunt.  I
began to learn my trade in late 1945.  Had I begun ten years later, I would
never have had the chance to earn while learning.  The short-story market was
sliding into the pits.  Luck is being born at the right time.  I had an agent
who kept me out of Hollywood despite some pretty offers.  I was lucky to have a
man so wise.  I decided against doing a series character in 1952.  I had no good
reason.  It was just a gut feeling.  I didn’t start McGee until 1964.  By then I
could avoid being trapped in the series.  Saying no was the purest kind of luck."

Simon Remembers Pryor

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Screenwriter Roger Simon remembers Richard Pryor and the movie they did together, BUSTIN LOOSE.

Some time in 1979, shortly after I had done The Big Fix for
Universal, the studio called to ask if I would like to write a movie
for Richard Pryor. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Pryor was
at the top of his game then, acknowledged by many to be possibly the
greatest standup comic of all time. Not only that, he was a cultural
icon of extraordinary proportions, the very voice of black America,
"Daddy Rich." What more could a Jewish white boy who grew up on Miles
Davis want than to work with this man?

Star Trek – The New Voyages

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2n2_1I’m  astonished and impressed. I just watched the two, fan-made, original STAR TREK "episodes" that were written about in this month’s issue of WIRED magazine:

Just like the original series, each New Voyages episode
lasts 51 minutes and is structured in five acts (act breaks are where
the commercials would go, if there were any). Like the original, New Voyages begins with that ethereal theremin score. Like the original, New Voyages favors bold primary colors, velour uniforms, and leggy women in miniskirts.

The acting and writing are cringe-inducing but everything else is amazing. I can’t believe what these imaginative and extremely talented film-makers were able to accomplish on a shoe-string budget (though it helps to have the FX pros from STAR TREK ENTERPRISE over-seeing the effects). 

The STAR TREK: NEW VOYAGES episodes, made with the permission of Paramount and with the cooperation of the Roddenberrys, succeed brilliantly at capturing the feel,  sound and look of the original series, more so than STAR TREK ENTERPRISE was able to do in their clunky, fourth season two-parter. 

The first two STAR TREK: THE NEW VOYAGES episodes are available free for download (including a DVD version that looks surprisingly good on a big-screen TV).  They are worth a look. The third episode promises to be even more polished:

Each New Voyages episode is produced with the help of a growing network of Star Trek professionals. The makeup supervisor for the new episode, for example, is Kevin Haney, who worked on one of the many Trek TV series spun off from the original (and won an Oscar for makeup in Driving Miss Daisy). The script is by D. C. Fontana, a story editor for the original Star Trek series and author of some of its most beloved episodes. (Who can forget the one where Kirk steers the Enterprise
into the Neutral Zone, near Romulan territory? Or the one that
introduces Spock’s parents?) And it will star Walter Koenig, the actor
who played navigator Pavel Chekov in the original series and seven of
the 10 films. The fact that Trek pros are taking part in this fan
project is something new in the world of filmmaking, the cinematic
equivalent of semi-pro ball.

…The value of the labor donated to New Voyages by Star Trek
professionals far exceeds any out-of-pocket expenses. Makeup supervisor
Kevin Haney directed a team whose bill would have come to tens of
thousands of dollars. The show’s special effects are supplied by
Cawley’s friend Max Rem (the professional CG f/x creator uses a
pseudonym to protect his day job). Rem worked on Star Trek for more than a decade, and he has worked on New Voyages since its inception in 2003. For the second New Voyages episode, Rem created more than 200 effects shots – from the Enterprise flying through space to backgrounds for greenscreen shots – all of which would have cost more than $1 million if he had billed New Voyages.

Watching the first two episodes of NEW VOYAGES makes you realize what ENTERPRISE should have been:  a return to the STAR TREK we all fell in love with. Note to Paramount: It’s not too late.

What to Spec?

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With so few comedies on the air, what sitcom should an aspiring writer spec as a sample of his or her talent? Veteran comedy writer/producer Ken Levine tackles that question this weekend on his blog.

Select a
current show you like and think you know the best. “Current” is the key word
here. Once a show is cancelled the shelf life for your spec is about six months.
So don’t start that ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT you’ve been developing. And I hope you
didn’t pour a lot of time and effort into a spec KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL. When
RAYMOND went off the air everyone was sad but show runners. No more reading
fifty RAYMONDS a day when trying to staff! And for that same reason, please let
this be WILL & GRACE’S last year! The good news is if you’ve got a spec
FRASIER you can just change the names and send it out as an OUT OF PRACTICE. And
of course you never have to worry with a SIMPSONS because they will go on making
new episodes forever…

…Unfortunately, there are not a lot of great shows out there at the moment. What
I think we’ll see this year is everybody writing a MY NAME IS EARL. It’s clearly
the best of the new crop. The only caution I give you is that EVERYBODY will be
writing one. If that doesn’t concern you (or you’ve written it already) I say go
for it. If it does then some suitable alternates might be SCRUBS, TWO AND A HALF
MEN, EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS, or HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER (a far cry from the CHEERS,
TAXI, MASH, COSBY days).

Talk About Taking Your Role Too Seriously…

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VertbrancatoapLillo Brancato Jr.,  an actor who played a wanna-be mobster on THE SORPANOS, has been arrested for the murder of an off-duty New York cop. It seems Brancato was as doomed in real-life as he was on the show — the moron and a buddy broke into a vacant house that was right next door to a cop’s home. The cop caught them, sparking a shoot-out. The officer was killed and both Brancato and his cohort were shot multiple times but survived, albeit in critical condition:

Officer Daniel Enchautegui, 28, collapsed in the driveway of his Bronx home
and died shortly afterward.

The wounded suspects were quickly captured. Investigators identified one as
Lillo Brancato Jr., an actor who got his break in the Robert De Niro-directed
film "A Bronx Tale" in 1993, and played doomed mob wannabe Matt Bevilacqua
during the 1999-2000 season of "The Sopranos."

He’s Back!

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078601709001_sclzzzzzzz_There are only a few living authors of western literature who can truly be called legends in the field — Richard Wheeler is one of them. He started a fascinating blog some time ago, then abandoned it, offering his views on writing and publishing on Ed Gorman’s blog and in comments here. But now he’s back with a blog of his own. Whether you read westerns of not, I highly recommend you put him on your blogroll for his valuable insights, candid opinions, and informed take on the biz (he was an editor before he became a novelist, so he knows both sides of the biz)

Today, in a discussion of Gary Svee’s book SANCTUARY, he blames publishers with a deeply-held, anachronistic view of westerns for the demise of the genre in print:

In the last several decades, western fiction has been forced into a procrustean
bed by New York’s mass-market publishers. And now almost all the western lines
are defunct as a result.

The idea, apparently, was to have a "line" of
books with similar classical covers and contents, and this would surely reach
the vast market of western readers pining for stories with 1940s titles that
employ words like "vengeance" and "showdown." This notion had the power of
religious conviction in New York, and still does even though most western lines
have gone to heaven, or hell as the case may be.

Wheeler’s new book FIRE IN THE HOLE is saddled with one of those traditional western covers…which bares no relation to the actual story. The hero isn’t a U.S. Marshal, he’s a detective posing as a vermin exterminator in a filthy, Montana mining camp. Not exactly your typical western hero or setting.  All you have to do is read the opening chapter and you’ll be hooked.