Me Me Me

Dom-inating

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I am back in Cologne, Germany, and enjoying the view of the Dom cathedral out of my hotel window. 

We had a wonderful little European roadtrip through Belgium and Holland. The highlights for me were Brugge, Belgium and Ultrecht, Holland, two incredibly beautiful cities with lots of canals, bridges, wonderful architecture, and colorful gardens. I have to visit both places again some day.

I wasn’t wild about Brussels — the streets made me nd my GPS go nuts.  The Brussels city planners must have been drunk when they devised their traffic flow scheme. Antwerp left me cold, too.

Amsterdam was interesting. I might have liked it more if I hadn’t seen Brugge first. It was also way too chaotic for me…crossing the street meant dodging trams, buses, bikes, motorcycles, cars and crowds of people. I felt like I was in a meteor shower. We also inadvertently strayed into the red-light district…where my 12-year-old daughter saw lots of, um, interesting things.  It wasn’t the prostitutes sitting in the windows that was unsettling for her, it was the window displays in the sex shops (then again, there was nothing there she didn’t see later in the front window of the sex shop right next door the Intercontinental Hotel here in Cologne).  It wasn’t easy explaining to her why a woman would wear a giant, rubber penis strapped to her waist. My wife told her it was to keep her hands free while she made scrambled eggs, but my daughter didn’t buy it and demanded that I tell her "exactly" what it was for. So I told her the truth. I said it was a clothes hanger.

My family returns to L.A. tomorrow but I have to stick around for a few more days to do some post-production work on FAST TRACK before finally returning home. This is the longest I have ever been away from the U.S. and I am beginning to feel home sick, even with my family here with me. It will be nice to sleep in my own bed again and stop living out of a suitcase for a little while.

More later…

Going Dutch

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Greetings from Haarlem,  Holland.

The screening of my FAST TRACK cut for the network execs last week at the Action Concept studios in Cologne went very well. They loved it…much to my relief. I’ve made their suggested changes to the cut and now I’m waiting to attend the "big" screening of the pilot at the network headquarters in Munich on August 8th. In the mean time, I am continuing with post-production…which includes working with the composer, the fx team, and supervising the "clean" cut for U.S. broadcast TV. France_lohr_brugge_342

But  I’ve snuck away for fives days with my family for a little European road-trip before they head back to L.A. on the 3rd (I’m still working though…I have a MONK book to write). We visited Brugge, Belgium, which is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. I must have taken 500 photos of the place.  I’ve posted a couple of them here.  Today we visited Antwerp and tomorrow it’s off to Amsterdam for a day or two…then back to Cologne.

Hello Again

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Sorry I have been scarce around here lately — I’ve just been too busy to post.

I’m back in Cologne after five days in the tiny village of Lohr, where I taught my fourth "Writers Room" seminar in Germany and researched my next MONK novel. I think it went well — I certainly had a good time.

While I was in Lohr, I screened the rough cut of FAST TRACK for the students (all writer/producers in Germany) and got some valuable feedback. I stayed in touch with the post-production department and, thanks to the wonders of high-speed internet, was able to fine-tune a "teaser trailer" for our international sales department, watch a few fx shots, and review the "audition scenes" submitted by four different composers who would like to do our score. On Sunday night, I found three hours for a walking tour of Lohr with a very knowledgeable woman from the historical society.

As if all that wasn’t enough to deprive me of sleep, the galleys for MR. MONK IN OUTER SPACE arrived while I was there and I have begun proofing the manuscript, which has to be back in NY at the end of the week in order to make the Oct. 30 pub date.

Early tomorrow morning, I’m making a few last minute tweaks to the FAST TRACK cut before the network execs arrive from Munich to see it. I’m crossing my fingers that they will like it!

Okay, time to go back to the galleys. I’ll report back soon.

(Why is it that Internet access is free in cheap hotels and costs a fortune in expensive hotels? And did you know that the McDonalds in Germany serve Grilled Shrimp Sandwiches and profiterolles?)

Paris and stuff

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I’ve driven in a lot of U.S. cities, and quite a few European ones, but I think if you can drive in Paris, you can probably drive  anywhere on earth. It’s dog-eat-dog on the roads there, no rules seem to apply. It’s infuriating,  exciting, and exhausting.

Since I was last here five years ago, it seems as though the population has quadrupled and most of them are on motorcycles. There’s less dog shit on the streets though, perhaps because it has never  stopped raining. It doesn’t feel like summer here at all.

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But Paris is still, well, Paris…a beautiful city and I had a wonderful dinner last night at  Lasserre with my wife, actress Alexia Barlier, our international  sales exec, and an exec from the French network M6, which will be airing FAST TRACK. I’ve  never been to a restaurant quite like it. Very elegant, with five waiters doing what’s ordinarily done by one. They do everything for you but pre-chew your food. In middle of the meal, the ceiling opened up…less like a skylight than SPECTRE’s hidden base in a dormant volcano. It was pretty cool.

My vacation will be ending soon… our director Axel Sand delivers his cut of FAST TRACK on Friday and on Saturday I head Action Concept studios in Cologne to do my cut. I’ve got about five days to work in the editing room…and then it’s off to Lohr to teach the principles of American TV writing & producing with writer/producer Jack Bernstein.  Jack and I worked together on DEADLY GAMES, but we’ve also both worked separately on SHE SPIES and MONK. He’s a great writer and a very funny guy, so it should be a lot of fun.

In the mean time, I have been re-reading a book that I’ve optioned, going through it with a highlighter and getting a feel for what the "screen" story will be…I hope to be able to get to work on that script (along with MONK #6: MR. MONK GOES  TO GERMANY) while I am awaiting word on whether  FAST TRACK will be picked up or not.

bois-le-roi

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Greetings from the tiny village of bois-le-roi france, where i am visiting my mother in law. She has no internet acess or even a computer, so I am attempting this post with my blackberry (thank god there is cellular coverage here or I’d be cut off from the outside world). FAST TRACK wrapped on Sunday (the day was spent  on second unit and insert work). The wrap party went into the wee hours of Monday morning and then I hit the road to France with my family. We stopped in Heidelburg, Nuremburg, and Strasbourg among other places along the way. It was nice, but I was exhausted. I have been sleeping a lot the last few days (about 10 hours a night!) and going on long walks, thinking about the next monk book. I am trying to relax a bit but it is taking some effort. I am eager to get in the editing room..but I have to wait for the director’s cut first. I haven’t read a book in ages, so once the monk outline is done, that’s next on my to-do list.

Soho Noir

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Smalllogo Someone just sent me this link to a Q&A interview I did some time ago with Soho Noir. I missed it when it originally went online. Here’s an excerpt:

What inspires your writing, where do your ideas come from?

When I was a kid, what inspired me was the sheer pleasure of writing and living in my dreams. Now my inspiration is equally driven by fear…the terror of not being able to pay my bills. My ideas can come from anywhere…an article in the newspaper, an overheard conversation, a "what-if" thought while driving in my car, a life experience. I never seem to be at a loss for ideas…it’s the details that kill me.

Novelist, scriptwriter, producer, you have been very successful at all three, and we are interested to know if you have a preference. If you had to choose between the three which one would it be?

If I could make the same amount of money writing books as I do from writing/producing TV shows, I could see walking away from screenwriting. I love TV, but the politics you have to deal with and the games you have to play can be exhausting and infuriating. On the other hand, being a novelist is a solitary pursuit and in television, you’re surrounded by enormously creative people and it’s inspiring.

There is a lot of fun in your work, is it difficult mixing crime with humour and why put the two together?

I can’t imagine writing anything without humor. There’s always something funny in every situation, it’s the balance that’s hard. But I find that humor is often what humanizes a character and makes the unbelievable believable.

Jack Webb’s Star

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Publisher’s Weekly singled out my short story "Jack Webb’s Star" in their review of the upcoming anthology HOLLYWOOD AND CRIME:
 

The 14 stories in this entertaining anthology from Shamus
Award–founder Randisi span Tinsel Town history from the 1930s to the
present and intersect, literally, at Hollywood and Vine. Top billing should go to Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch
story, "Suicide Run," and to Lee Goldberg’s "Jack Webb’s Star"—the
former for the detection and the latter for biggest laughs. Other
highlights include Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens’s
reinvention of one of the Three Stooges, Moe Howard, as a detective in
their clever "Murderlized," about the 1937 death of the Stooges’
mentor, vaudevillian Ted Healy. Robert S. Levinson delivers a wicked
portrait of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in "And the Winner Is…,"
which turns on her lackey’s efforts to stop a Nazi sharpshooter at the
1960 Academy Awards. From Harry Bosch’s visit to a photographer at Hollywood & Vine Studios to Moe’s meeting at a coffee shop at that intersection, all the tales pay homage to the storied Hollywood street corner. (June)

 

Me on TV…again

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I’m back again as a guest on Steve Murphy’s INSIDER EXCLUSIVE with NY criminal defense attorney Laura Miranda. I come in about mid-way through the episode to talk about MONK, DIAGNOSIS MURDER and  my daughter’s literary aspirations. And stick around after he says good-bye to me…because I come right back, teaming with Laura.

And if you missed me on INSIDER EXCLUSIVE with famed criminal defense attorney Tom Mesereau, you can see it here.

Me on TV

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You can catch me and criminal defense attorney Thomas Mesereau together on the latest episode of  INSIDER EXCLUSIVE with Steve Murphy on the web and on a cable station near you. Steve is a congenial interviewer and, although he makes a couple errors (he calls me the "creator and host" of MONK on the "USA Today" network), it was a lot of fun to be a guest and I think you’ll enjoy watching. I taped as second episode that day, with another criminal defense attorney, and will share that link with you as soon as I get it.