Lee Goldberg

Mystery Lovers Corner

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I got a spam email the other day from Dawn Doodle of  Mystery Lovers Corner, an amateurish website that, for a one-time fee of $35, will list your bio and  one of your books.

You don’t want readers to wonder why your books aren’t here.

Lots of categories to classify your books.

We had our Grand Opening 5/27/05, and since then we‚ve had over 1700 hits to the website.  More authors are joining daily.  Currently over 60 have joined, including Carolyn Hart, Joanne Fluke, Robin Hathaway, and Lyn Hamilton.

We also have a Featured Author each month.  They answer interview questions and are featured on an additional page for no additional cost.  In the future, we may increase the number of Featured Authors each month to give more authors the extra exposure

I don’t see how paying for "exposure" on this amateurishly-designed, no-prestige, low-traffic site is much of a promotional opportunity — not to brag, but I get more hits here per day than they’ve had in five months. A blank page could probably get more hits (especially if you put the word breasts in the text somewhere).  Her low traffic and sloppy design simply aren’t worth the thirty five bucks.

In my opinion, you’re much better off spending the money on a five month subscription
to Typepad ($4.95-a-month, first month free) and starting your own blog. It will
look a lot better than her site, it will focus only on YOU, and you’ll probably
get as much (if not more) traffic than you would on her obscure corner of
cyberspace.

Can You Get My Portrait Signed?

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I got this email today:

My wife and I have been huge Dick Van Dyke fans since the early 1960’s.  Would
you please consider forwarding this email to Mr. Van Dyke, since it concerns a
portrait of him that I recently completed.  I’m hoping to persuade him to sign
one of my prints for my private art collection of celebrity portraits…

… I realize that this is a brazen request, but I hope that you will consider it
anyway.  If you would like, I’ll send you a digital photo so that you can
determine if my Dick Van Dyke drawing is worthy of a signature.

Please don’t.

Intercutting

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I got this email today:

I’m having trouble presenting a multiple location event in my screenplay. Let’s say, for example, there are 5 peace rallies in 5 US cities all going on at the same time. At each event there is some action and dialogue. We stay only briefly at each location. How the heck is that written? Every way I try to present it seems awkward. Thanks for your time.

Here’s how I replied. I think one reason it’s awkward is that the situation isn’t very conducive to good story telling. It’s hard to create conflict, or reveal much character, or tell a story, while cutting back and forth between five very similar events. My first bit of advice would be to restructure your story so you DON’T have to cut between five nearly identical events. But, barring that, you need to make it as simple as you can.

EXT. LOS ANGELES PEACE RALLY – DAY

Griffith Park is crowded with THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE (don’t you just love CGI? How did people make movies before?) It’s pouring rain. Biff and Joan make love in the mud while everyone around them sings Koombaya. Joan has great breasts. INTERCUT WITH:

EXT. CHICAGO PEACE RALLY – NIGHT

Convention Center. There are TENS OF THOUSANDS of peace-loving people here. But we don’t care about them. We FIND Jake creeping under the stage, carrying the BOMB that’s hidden inside the
INFLATABLE WOMAN. She has great breasts, too. INTERCUT WITH:

INT. SEATTLE PEACE RALLY – DAY

Hundreds of people mill around the base of the SPACE NEEDLE, holding hands and chanting. We PAN UP to the observation tower of the Space Needle, where HOYT, 12, is about to pour a cup of STARBUCK COFFEE on the people below, some of whom have great breasts and some of whom don’t. INTERCUT WITH:

and when you’re done visiting your five locations (I am exhausted just thinking about it), you end the sequence with a simple END INTERCUT.

He-Men and the Masters of the Universe

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My friend Gregg Hurwitz and his family came over to our house yesterday afternoon for BBQ, swimming, and lazing around.  When it got dark, the kids went inside to play and the grown-ups stayed outside to talk. We were having a nice conversation when Gregg’s wife very calmly pointed out that there was a tarantula crawling by Gregg’s feet. I don’t know who yelped louder or jumped higher out of his seat — me or Gregg.

We’ve seen rabbits, scorpions, mice, squirrels, rattlesnakes, bobcats, deer, lizards, coyotes, and swarms of bees in our yard but never, ever, EVER a tarantula. The spider was huge and black and terrifying. And moved very fast.

Gregg and I, squeeling and whining like little girls, finally managed to trap the spider in a jar and dump him out on the hillside behind our house. But I found the whole thing very funny. Here are these two men — guys who’ve written all kinds of books and TV shows about tough-guy action heroes —  who turned into complete blithering sissies at the sight of a gigantic, but harmless, spider.

Just goes to prove that those who can’t do don’t teach…they write about it.

The Windy City Likes The Goldbergs

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I don’t know what it is about Chicago, but the Windy City sure is kind to us Goldbergs. First, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times gave my book DIAGNOSIS MURDER: THE PAST TENSE great reviews. Now TimeOut Chicago is raving about my brother Tod Goldberg’s short story collection SIMPLIFY:

[Tod] Goldberg’s work is an eclectic collection of realist and surrealist storytelling, from a brother’s difficult return from the first Gulf War to a kid who turns invisible after witnessing his father’s infidelity. The overheated suburbs of southern California and the crazed, sun-scorched roads through the outlying deserts are the perfect settings for Goldberg’s characters. In a story that exemplifies his skill for blending the unreal with the everyday, a dyslexic kid creates his own language as a way to deal with life’s stresses. As he witnesses a brutal act of violence against a fellow student and his careerist father becomes more and more aloof after a move to L.A., the kid fills binders and binders with his personal alphabet, a secret distress code. It’s a startling and shuddersome story, with the kind of atmospheric tension we’ve come to expect from the new wave of Japanese horror movies.

Now let’s see if my sisters Linda Woods and Karen Dinino get a rave from Chicago when their book, VISUAL CHRONICLES, comes out in February.

Doing the Konrath III

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Author Joe Konrath, the champion of stock signing, has inspired me to drop in on bookstores wherever I go and sign the stock of DIAGNOSIS MURDER novels. This weekend, I was up in Seattle. The tally:  Eight stores visited, 53 books signed.

Can I Sue?

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I got this email the other day:

If you’ve got
any time in your hectic sked to offer me advice I’d be grateful. As far as I know, you’re not a lawyer, but as a seasoned pro you may know!
Anyone that writes anything knows that ideas float around the ether waiting to be written.
Who hasn’t at least once, had that great , only to find out a week later  has just nailed a deal for the
same premise. That’s just the way it goes.

However… six years ago I wrote my first screenplay. It’s called XYZ, and it’s about an ex-astronaut who owns a farm/ranch in Montana. He builds his own rocket in a grain silo to launch himself into space.
Today I read that Billy Bob Thornton is to star in a movie called THE ASTRONAUT FARMER about… well you guessed it!There are no other plot points for me to see and compare yet.

I registered the screenplay electronically with ProtectRite in 1999. In the past few years I’ve entered the screenplay into a few competitions including Tribeca Films – for which I got a commendation, didn’t win of course.

So my question is this… let’s say this in-production screenplay bears a remarkable or even "uncanny" similarity to my finished work in structure and story. Do I have any recourse,  or is it just tough shit as I’m a still un-produced nobody without an agent?

Like you said, I’m not a lawyer. My guess is that
you’d have to prove that the screenwriter and producers had access to your screenplay and read it.
But I will say this, it’s not the world’s most original idea. There was even an
Andy Griffith TV movie with roughly the same concept and that later spawned a
short-lived TV series called SALVAGE ONE.

I think you sort of answered the question yourself in the first paragraph of your email… sometimes, people just get the same idea at the same time.

Many years ago, Bill and I thought we had a great idea for a spec script… a Russian cop who comes to the U.S. to find a bad guy and gets paired up with an LAPD detective. We called it RED HEAT. We were in the midst of writing it when we heard about…you guessed it… a movie going into production called RED HEAT starring Arnold as a Russian cop. This has happened to us many times during our career.

For a couple years now, Bill and I have been pitching a procedural series around town  about a special, multi-agency law enforcement team that goes after the most-wanted fugitives. This summer, TNT premiered WANTED, a series with the same basic notion. Do we think we were ripped off? No. There were probably a dozen guys out there pitching a variation of the same idea at the same time we were. That’s the entertainment business.

 

Room 222

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Bill Rabkin and I are teaching another four-week, online course of  "Beginning Television Writing" for Writers University. For more information on the session, which begins Sept. 5, click here. I don’t know how the students feel about it, but we’ve been really enjoying the experience. This is our third or fourth time doing it and I’ve discovered that helping others learn how we do what we do has sharpened my own writing. In fact, I applied some advice we gave a student the other day (she was having trouble structuring her story)  to one of our own pitches and it made a big difference.

He is, He says

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Ever wonder what taking a novel-writing seminar is like? My brother Tod, the literary novelist, reveals all.

Sometimes I’ll sing a song or two because, well, when you get to sit in front of
the class it’s kinda freeing to know that if you wanna belt out, say, Total
Eclipse of the Heart or Can’t Hardly Wait or even a little something from the
Neil Diamond song book, you totally can. And then we’ll get back to talking
about your story, which may be really good, or really bad, or really mediocre
and, at the very least, you’ll know my thoughts and might be humming a song,
too.