Other Random Posts

My Day at the LATFOB

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IMG_0290 I had a great time at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books today. It was held at USC for the first time, and that was a little disorienting…but in a good way. Most of the bookstores booths were  in the same spot, year after year, at UCLA. But at USC, I didn't know where any of them were…so wandering the campus was more fun because I "found" the bookstores as I went along.  I think I ended up visiting more booths and buying more books as a result. My haul included guidebooks for San Francisco (research for Monk) and signed copies of books by Steve Martin, Kelli Stanley, Tom Franklin, and Laura Lippman.

My general sense was that there were fewer people attending the fest at USC than there were past years at UCLA, but that might just be because the festival was more spread out and less crammed together. 

There was one definite improvement over UCLA — the author "green room" was much swankier and more comfortable. Even the food was better.

I chatted with Gary Phillips, Kelli Stanley, Denise Hamilton, Mark Haskell Smith, Aimee Bender, agent Ken Sherman, LA Times Magazine editor Nancie Clare, and lots of other authors before I got together with my fellow panelists Don Winslow, John Vorhaus and Thomas Perry for lunch.

Tom and I had a long talk about JUSTIFIED, and what makes Elmore Leonard so special, and the appeal of amiable bad guys. We also talked about the fates of the TV pilot scripts for BUTCHER'S BOY (for Fox) and JANE WHITEFIELD (for CBS). We talked about some of the books Tom abandoned before finishing…and about the new stuff he has coming.

I went all fan-boy over Don Winslow when he joined us… I think his book SAVAGES is the best book I've read so far this year. I loved it and grilled him on some of his daring creative choices.

Then it was time to head off to our panel. 

She actually didn't know how to get to our room, but luckily I did, so I ended up guiding our guide. The panel went great. Don, John, and Thomas were terrific and not only were they very funny, but they shared some very good insights into the writing process (I used some of what I learned from them at lunch during our personal conversations as the jumping off point for some of our panel discussions). Afterwards, we had good signing and headed back to the green room to eat more food. (That's John, Don, me and Tom in the picture)

After gorging ourselves, Don, Thomas and I went to Mystery Ink's booth for another signing and talk shop.

All-in-all, it was a fine day. 

 

MWA Announces Edgar Winners

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Mystery Writers of America is proud to announce the winners of the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2010. The Edgar® Awards were presented to the winners at our 65th Gala Banquet, April 28, 2011 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York City.

BEST NOVEL

The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton (Minotaur Books)
 

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR

Rogue Island by Bruce DeSilva (Tom Doherty Associates – Forge Books)
 

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

Long Time Coming by Robert Goddard (Random House – Bantam)

BEST FACT CRIME

Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime and Complicity 
by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry (University of Nebraska Press – Bison Original)
 
 
BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his
Rendezvouz with American History by Yunte Huang (W.W. Norton)
 
 
BEST SHORT STORY

"The Scent of Lilacs" – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Doug Allyn (Dell Magazines)

 
BEST JUVENILE

The Buddy Files: The Case of the Lost Boy by Dori Hillestad Butler (Albert Whitman & Co.)

 
BEST YOUNG ADULT

Interrogation of Gabriel James by Charlie Price (Farrar, Straus, Giroux Books for Young Readers)
 
 
BEST PLAY
 
The Psychic by Sam Bobrick (Falcon Theatre – Burbank, CA)
 

BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY

“Episode 1” - Luther, Teleplay by Neil Cross (BBC America)
 
 
ROBERT L. FISH MEMORIAL AWARD

"Skyler Hobbs and the Rabbit Man" – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 
by Evan Lewis (Dell Magazines)
 
 
GRAND MASTER

Sara Paretsky
 

RAVEN AWARDS

Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore, Forest Park, Illinois
Once Upon A Crime Bookstore, Minneapolis, Minnesota
 

THE SIMON & SCHUSTER – MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD
(Presented at MWA’s Agents & Editors Party on Wednesday, April 27, 2011)
 
The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

 

Backdoor Pilots

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Jaime Weinman writes today in MacLeans about the network practice of using episodes of existing series as “backdoor pilots” for new shows. It’s a way to save money on making a pilot. Since standalone busted pilots cost millions of dollars, have no commerical value, and will never air anywhere,  shooting them as an episode of an existing series allows studios to recoup their costs from the syndication revenue of a hit series. Tonight’s episode of BONES is one such episode.

The problem is, backdoor pilots usually end up being one of the worst episodes of whatever series is hosting them. That’s because the stars of the host series, by design, have to take a back seat to the stars of the pilot…and let’s face it, people aren’t tuning in to see the pilot characters, they are tuning in to see the characters they already know and love.  Weinman writes:

Networks and producers used to disguise the fact that that was what they were doing, because it might drive viewers away if they knew they were going to be watching a new hero. The usual spot to put this kind of episode was in the last episode of the season, which before the Season Finale concept took hold was often used for filler episodes: hence, Star Trek‘s Assignment Earth was the last episode of the second season, and Mary Tyler Moore ended its second season with a failed attempt to create a new show for Bill Daily.

The networks and producers can’t really disguise backdoor pilots — because they can’t function as pilots without being pilots, introducing us to the characters and franchise of the proposed show. But it’s a practice that has worked.

Some of hit shows that began as backdoor pilots (also known, some years back, as “nested spin-offs”) include Diagnosis Murder, NCIS, CSI: Miami, Maude, SWAT, Petticoat Junction, Laverne  & Shirley, Barnaby Jones, Empty Nest, Knots Landing, and Stargate: Atlantis. 

The many, many shows that have hosted busted, backdoor pilots include Magnum PI, Cosby, Spenser: For Hire, Star Trek, Vegas, Charlie’s Angels, Murder She Wrote, Smallville, House, and The Rockford Files (which had at least three!)

Bill Rabkin and I were the executive producers of Diagnosis Murder with Fred Silverman, the man who once ran CBS, ABC and NBC and was known as the “king of the spin-off.” Since Diagnosis Murder was a nested spinoff of Jake and the Fatman, which itself was a nested spin-off of Matlock, Silverman was a big believer in backdoor pilots and  insisted that we do at least one every season. Diagnosis Murder tried at least six of them that I know of and they all went nowhere.

We personally did three of them, including Whistlers, basically a tame Lethal Weapon with women, and The Chief, starring Fred Dryer as the leader of the LAPD. Here’s  the main title sequence for Whistlers:


and the sales pitch for The Chief:

 

We were very clever with how we structured The Chief as a back-door pilot…and it was the only one of the Diagnosis Murder backdoor pilots that actually had a shot getting picked up.

We wrote it as a tw0-hour, sweeps episode of the series…but crafted it in such a way that we could edit it down to one-hour and cut almost all of the Diagnosis Murder cast out of the show for internal sales purposes 

Fred Dryer was great in the part…and newcomer Neil McDonough had real star power. We were sure we were on to something. The two-hour movie was one of the highest rated shows of the week, #12 if memory serves, and when we had the one-hour version tested, the scores were among the best Fred Silverman had ever seen. Silverman was convinced we were a lock for the fall schedule.

Unfortunately, this was one of the rare cases where ratings and testing didn’t mean as much to the network as personality…nobody at CBS wanted to work with Fred Dryer (which begs the question, why did CBS let us cast him, and why did they pay the  “pilot breakage” on his salary for the guest shot, if they had no intention of greenlighting a series with him in the lead?). 

But Silverman wasn’t concerned. With the numbers and testing we had, and with Dryer’s successful track record with the hit series Hunter, he was convinced we’d have a sale in a matter of weeks with another network.  

We took it to every network and pitched it face-to-face to their presidents (that was the power of working with Silverman), and every one of them had some personal reason for not wanting to be in business with Dryer…and seemed to take great pleasure in passing on the project in the room to his implacable face.

As it turned out, a couple of years later CBS did a very simlar show (The District) with great success and a star reportedly as difficult as Dryer reportedly was (Craig T. Nelson)…and NBC ended up reviving Hunter for six episodes and discovered, or so we heard, that Dryer was even more reportedly difficult than he’d ever reportedly been before.

I guess we dodged a bullet. 

Bloated Writing Credit

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Soul-surfer-movie-posterI've done a lot of WGA credit arbitrations and can't imagine what the committee that judged SOUL SURFER was thinking. The screenwriting credits for SOUL SURFER are the longest I have ever seen…

Screen Story by Sean McNamara & Deborah Schwartz & Douglas Schwartz & Michael Berk and Matt R. Allen & Caleb Wilson & Brad Ganin based on the book by Bethany Hamilton, Sheryl Berk, and Rick Bundshuh

Screenplay by Sean McNamara & Deborah Schwartz & Douglas Schwartz & Michael Berk

And it's not what you'd call a very complex story, as opposed to say the ten-hour GAME OF THRONES, which has this screen credit:

Screenplay by David Benioff & D.B Weiss, based on the novel by George R.R. Martin

Or, say, INCEPTION, which had this screen credit:

Screenplay by Christopher Nolan

What was so daunting and complex about the story of  a girl whose arm is bitten off by a shark that it would require a team of seven credited writers to adapt and four to write? It boggles the mind.

My Loss is Your Gain

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The_Walk_FINAL Now, thanks to a temporary technical screw-up, you can get my runaway Kindle bestsellers THE WALK for just $1.99 and THREE WAYS TO DIE for only 99 cents.

It's infuriating for me…but a steal for you. But you'd better act now, because if I have my way, these savings will end as soon as possible.

And no, this is not a lame publicity stunt. I had nothing to do with the dramatic cut in prices and I am doing everything I can to get it fixed. But in the mean time, I need to sell a lot of books to make up for my losses… 

So go for it…get the books cheap while you can!

UPDATE 4/15/2011. I am pleased to say that you're too late. Amazon has restored the original pricing. 

A Day of Romance

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Mystery_mixer I spent the day at the Romantic Times conference in Los Angeles, starting with the Mystery Chix and Private Dix breakfast. Before the breakfast, a bunch of us authors got together for an hour or so and had a private, round-table chat about the fast-moving changes in the business and the rise of ebooks. That conversation — with Rhys Bowen, Doug Lyle, Brett Battles, Sue Ann Jaffarian, Lori Armstrong, Robert Gregory Browne, Dianne Emlley, and Doug Lyle —  was worth the trip by itself.

To kick-off the breakfast, attended by a couple hundred romance & mystery readers, I interviewed Bill Link, co-creator of COLUMBO, and then joined my fellow authors in a raffle of our books.

My next gig was a panel on the business of Hollywood with author Stephanie Bond and development exec whose name escapes me (is this a sign of creeping senility?). He was a very nice guy, but he said something I strongly disagreed with. A woman asked the panel what the best way was to present her novel to a  development exec for consideration as a movie or TV series.

"Make a book trailer," he said, adding that was the only way to really grab the attention of his bosses and convey the feeling of the book. 1000000177

He was a very nice guy… but God, what incredibly bad advice. What the development guy was basically saying was that his boss had the attention span of a 2 year-old, or was illiterate, or was just plain lazy. If the execs at his company can't be bothered to read a punchy paragraph or two, fuck them. You don't want to be in business with people who don't know how to read.

On a more practical note, the only book trailer most authors are capable of producing is going to be a bunch of stock photos, some stock music, and some simple text, all badly edited together into a dull mish-mash. How is that going to put the best spin on your book?  Besides, you're authors, not film-makers. Your job is to write a great book and maybe a good summary your agent can use to sell it to Hollywood. If the boss can't envision the movie from the book or summary without an amatuer trailer, the dimwit has no imagination…another reason not to be in business with them.

But it was a lively, fun panel and, outside of that one comment, which I kept making fun of, the development guy gave a lot of really good advice.

I grabbed a quick lunch with my buddy Ken Levine, who was meeting two of his fans, authors Beth Ciotta and Mary Stella, then went off to lead a two-hour seminar on TV writing, which was a lot of fun. Afterwards, I had a long talk with Barry Eisler about the epub biz, which we'll continue over breakfast on Saturday.

All in all, a very busy, and very enjoyable. day.

(Pictured: the mystery chix gang — Rhys Bowen, Lori Armstrong, me, Brett Battles, Allison Brennan, DP Lyle and Robert Gregory Browne and, in the second photo, me and Ken Levine)