My Blog

This and That

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I've been too busy to post the last couple of days. Mostly, I've been plugging away on my latest MONK book. I've taken some time out, though. Yesterday, I watched my daughter Maddie earn her black belt in Tae Kwon Do (yahoo!) and today I attended the MWA-SoCal Christmas party at the Jonathan Club in Santa Monica. While munching on tacos and fajitas, I caught up on the latest happenings with authors Paul Levine, Christa Faust, Les Klinger, and Matt Witten, among many others. The big talk around the tables was the frightening situation for writers in TV and in publishing, the dire circumstances of Borders, and NBC's decision to stop producing scripted programs at 10 p.m on weeknights. Nobody had answers, of course, but there were plenty of worries to share. It's a scary time to be a writer. But it wasn't all doom and gloom. There were plenty of funny anecdotes swapped back-and-forth, stories about new novels and projects people were working on, and the usual gossiping. 

Will the Real Nick Schenk Please Stand Up?

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Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on Nick Schenk, a struggling Minnesota screenwriter who’d sold the first script he’d ever written, GRAN TORINO, to Clint Eastwood, who shot it without changing a word. It was an unlikely, inspiring success story.

The script was so well crafted and understated (and the credits went by so fast) that after seeing the picture, I immediately called Bill Gerber, one of the film’s producers, to find out which one of the many A-list screenwriters who must always be knocking down Eastwood’s door had penned the story.

“Are you sitting down?” Gerber asked. He had quite a surprise. The writer, Nick Schenk, who lives in Minnesota, had never sold a feature script in his life. In fact, the only writing work Schenk had done was for “BoDog Fight,” a mixed martial arts TV show, a game show called “Let’s Bowl” and some comedy sketches collected in a DVD called “Factory Accident Sex.” (“That title doesn’t exactly help my career, does it?” Schenk jokes.)
Schenk says he wrote the script, using a pen and a pad of paper, sitting at night in a bar called Grumpy’s in northeast Minneapolis.

But in today’s Daily Variety, Schenk tells a very different story.

Nick Schenk sold the first script he ever wrote. “It went to Disney and, not to date myself, but Katzenberg greenlit that thing, and when he went to Dreamworks it died that day. They had a director and it was cast — the whole works.” TV gigs and spec scripts followed.

So what’s the real story?

Final Chapter for Books?

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The New Yorker paints a bleak picture of publishing today. Borders is facing bankruptcy. There have been massive firings at Random House and its subsidiaries. Simon and Schuster cut thirty-five jobs, Thomas Nelson cut 54. Harcourt halted acquisitions of new manuscripts, and Penguin froze salaries for anyone making $50,000 or more. More bloodshed and consolidation is certainly on the way, even at smaller houses. The article included this quote from an editor at Farrar Straus Giroux:

We’re privately owned and not quite as massive as houses like Random House. We’ve definitely been feeling the burn with shorter print runs and a tightening on what we can buy, and we’ve had some really bleak editorial meetings.

Bad News for Writers, Actors, Directors…

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NBC is handing over the 10 p.m. hour, five-nights-a-week, to a talkshow hosted by Jay Leno. That's very bad news for guys like me who write episodic dramas. As Variety reports:

With 10 p.m. now filled by Leno – not to mention Sunday Night Football consuming four hours on Sunday and repeats on Saturday – NBC may program as few as ten hours of traditional primetime fare next fall. With some of those hours likely to be reality shows, there's not much room left for scripted fare.

[…]"What does this mean to my show?" asked one NBC exec producer almost
immediately after word of the Leno move leaked. Indeed, some shows may
wind up with shorter orders than the traditional 22 episode season, as
Peacock's needs may be less.

With cheap reality shows taking up more and more primetime real estate, and with writing staffs on dramas shrinking to cut costs, it's getting harder and harder for veteran TV writers to make a living…or for newcomers to break in.

Mr. Monk at the Roundtable

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Tracy Farnsworth at Roundtable Review gives MR. MONK IS MISERABLE a thumbs-up. She writes, in part:

Fans of the show are in for a treat. […]Goldberg does a stunning job capturing Natalie's voice. If you are missing the show between new episodes, the books are just as good, if not better. In fact, I have my fingers crossed that producers consider televising this latest novel. It has some excellent Monk moments!

Thank you, Tracy! I'm afraid that it's very unlikely that this book will be adapted for the show. The series is set in San Francisco and shot in Los Angeles on a very tight budget. Just going to Pasadena is a pricey proposition for them. It's also the series' final season so I think that Paris, Germany and Hawaii, the settings for three of my seven Monk books, are definitely out of their reach.

The book also gets a positive nod from the And Then I Read blog, which gives it 8 1/2 stars out of 10. I like this observation from the review:

I must confess, I love it when Adrian Monk is out of his milieu, but let's face it, Monk is out of his milieu five steps outside the front door of his apartment.

That is so true, which is what makes it so much fun for me when I take him somewhere he has never been before,  whether it's Hawaii or a science fiction convention.

Bad Weather

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Let me start by saying, once again, that I consider myself a Robert B. Parker fan. When he's on his game, there's nobody better.

But ROUGH WEATHER is, by far, the worst Spenser novel yet. It's not the worst book Parker has ever written, but it's pretty close to it.  

The story kicks off with Spenser and Susan attending a wedding on a private island that turns into a violent kidnapping. Not a bad teaser into the story, except that neither Spenser, Susan, nor anyone else seems to react much to the extreme violence that they witness. From that point on, the story becomes almost entirely expositional, falling into a pattern that goes something like this:

1) Something happens, though the "something" is usually just a dull, expositional conversation between Spenser and someone else (and if it's a woman, she'd desperately like to sleep with him but he declines).
2) Spenser tells someone else about what happened.
3) Spenser tells someone else about what happened.
4) Spenser discusses what happened again with someone else, or with a group of people.
5) Spenser has another conversation with someone.
6) repeat scenes 2, 3 and 4.
7) Someone tries to beat up Spenser, but the someone is woefully ill-suited for the task and Spenser casually kicks his ass.
7) Repeat scenes 2, 3 and 4.
8) Someone tries to kill Spenser, but Spenser easily kills them first and/or takes prisoners.
9) repeat scenes 2, 3 and 4, and then repeat them again for good measure, since someone got killed or captured.

There are two set pieces — the kidnapping and an attempt on Spenser's life — and the rest is flat exposition. There's more sitting around and talking in this book than in a Nero Wolfe. The plot is obvious, there isn't a single surprise or twist.  The book ended abruptly with the bad guy coming in and simply telling Spenser what we, the readers, have already guessed a dozen chapters earlier. It's like Parker just got tired of writing and arbitrarily decided to stop.

Spenser doesn't actually have to get out from behind his desk in the finale, which is yet another scene of people sitting around and telling us what we already know. Spenser doesn't do anything, or really solve anything. The one benefit is that the book is short, maybe only 35,000 words, if that, so just when you're thinking about giving up, it's already over.

I think this is going to be my last Spenser novel. Parker is a very frustrating author. At times he's great (check out APPALOOSA, DOUBLE PLAY, the early Spensers and the early Jesse Stones) but lately, with the exception of his westerns, he just seems to type. 

I honestly believe if anybody besides an author of Parker's stature and success had turned in a book to an editor as sloppy, dull, and thin as ROUGH WEATHER, it never would have been published.

Beverly Garland

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Actress Beverly Garland died today. She guest-starred on a DIAGNOSIS MURDER episode that Bill Rabkin and I wrote that brought back Mike Connors as Joe Mannix. Connors was quoted in her Los Angeles Times obituary:

"Not only was she a terrific actress, she was one of
those special gals who was fun to work with," said Mike Connors, who
appeared with Garland in director Roger Corman's low-budget 1955 film
"Swamp Women" and later worked with her when she made guest appearances
on his TV detective series "Mannix."

"She had a great sense of humor,
she was very thoughtful and had a great laugh," Connors said. "You
couldn't help but laugh with her when she laughed."

Garland guest-starred in the 25-year-old MANNIX episode that we were using for flashbacks and reprised the same character in our DIAGNOSIS MURDER episode.

I remember calling her and telling her about what we had in mind. She remembered the MANNIX episode, and the character, very fondly — which was amazing, considering the 100s of  TV guest-shots she'd done in her career. She was very exciting about the chance to reprise a character that she'd played so long ago.

We sent her over a tape of the MANNIX episode and when she showed up on set the first day — an apartment in West Los Angeles — she had the character and her accent down cold. It was uncanny…as if she'd played it just yesterday instead of twenty five years earlier. 

She seemed to have a great time, particularly between shots when she was talking about the old days with Connors and Dick Van Dyke. For me, a true TV geek, it was one wonderful just to be able to sit there and listen to their conversation, prodding it along every now and then with a question.

I'm glad I had a chance to meet her and work with her.

Are Canadian Showrunners an Endangered Species?

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A bunch of Canadian showrunners sat down with the Globe & Mail newspaper and shared their worry that they are becoming a dying breed in the TV biz in the Great White North:

They see production companies and network executives interfering endlessly and pointlessly in the direction of certain shows. They say that a series might begin as a drama with occasional moments of comedy, and then, thanks to battles and conniptions in distant offices, by the fifth episode the series has morphed into a comedy.

They worry that hardly anybody in the industry, apart from themselves, understands what the term "showrunner" means (a senior writer with some executive responsibilities). They point out that the best television in recent years – The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Mad Men, The Shield and, in Canada, Intelligence, have been driven by writers who control almost every aspect of a production, but in Canada a writer is almost never allowed to follow through on a storytelling vision.

That may be why so much Canadian TV is — to be blunt — plodding and dull. Or, as a Canadian commentator put it back in 2003…

Why can't Canadians make a decent cop show? It's not as if they don't have examples to copy. You can't turn on the television without finding a cop show on somewhere. […]Like most Canadian TV dramas, Cold Squad is directed as if it were a stage play. The actors emote as if they were trying to make sure buddy in the back row can follow the play. To buddy on the couch, though, the overacting is just annoying.

[On Canadian cop shows] the characters are usually less than persuasive, for example. The characters on Blue Murder articulate as if they were playing Shakespeare.
[…]The actors of course are not helped by scripts which often seem to have been written by people who've been living in monasteries since birth – monasteries with vows of silence, too. The dialogue and situations are often artificial and beyond any help the actors can give them. Canadian scripts also tend to be short on action and plot twists, preferring long, long over-explained scenes. 

I couldn't agree more, at least based on the Canadian dramas that I've seen.

I've produced two U.S. series in Canada — COBRA in Vancouver and MISSING in Toronto — so I've watched a lot of Canadian TV while looking for directors, production designers, and actors. It's no secret why Canadian TV series aren't as marketable or popular worldwide as U.S. or U.K. crime dramas.  It's because they are bland, devoid of strong conflicts, sharply-drawn characters and compelling narrative drive. They just can't compete against U.S. or U.K. drama on any level.  

I know that's a broad and very unfair generalization, and that there may be Canadian shows that are terrific…but I haven't seen one yet.  On the other hand, I've seen a LOT of fantastic British crime dramas, though. It's not that Canada doesn't have the writing talent…it does…but I suspect that their best TV writers head to the U.S. as soon as they possibly can (at least that's what I've been told by my friends toiling in Canadian TV). The Globe & Mail worries about that, too:

What I take away is that they want to stay, to live and write on the
West Coast, and tell their stories there. Given their worries and
horror stories, I fear that, sooner rather than later many will be in
on the West Coast, but in Los Angeles, and they won't be telling
Canadian stories.

Back when I was a writer on MURPHY'S LAW, which we shot up in Vancouver in 1989, I endured some episodes of STREET LEGAL, a wanna-be L.A. LAW that was the "crown jewel" of Canadian TV at the time. It was a series that seemed utterly devoid of conflict. There were shampoo commercials with more gripping storylines and more at stake for their characters.  I couldn't understand how anyone could write a TV show that was so bland…or why anyone would want to watch it.

NIGHT HEAT, made around the same time, managed to make TJ HOOKER look like NYPD BLUE by comparison. MOM PI, TRADERS, DANGER BAY, NEON RIDER, NORTH OF 60, ENG, and DIAMONDS, while not all cop shows, I recall as being mind-numbingly dull.

I've been told many times that DAVINCI'S INQUEST is the best cop show ever made on Canadian TV. I've only seen some early episodes of the series, and one episode of the DAVINCI'S CITY HALL sequel series, and if that is the crown jewel of Canadian crime drama today, it's not saying much for the genre up there.

More recent Canadian cop shows like BLUE MURDER and COLD SQUAD were unbearably ponderous, musty and flat, not even remotely in the same league as U.S. or U.K. dramas. Simply compare COLD SQUAD to the similarly-themed U.S. series COLD CASE or the U.K's WAKING THE DEAD and you'll see what I mean…or compare the Canadian MURDOCK MYSTERIES to the U.K.'s INSPECTOR MORSE, REBUS, or LEWIS. The Canadian stuff feels desaturated, sanitized of color, emotion, drama and energy.

To be fair, I haven't seen INTELLIGENCE, FLASHPOINT or THE BORDER — but I have heard
very good things about them. They may represent a significant
turning point in Canadian episodic crime dramas. I certainly hope so.

Perhaps the problems with Canadian episodic drama all comes down an unwillingness by Canadian networks to commit to the showrunner system, to allow writers with a strong, consistent, artistic vision to run their series. If so, it's a damn shame.