#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
My brother Tod’s story "Mitzvah" in Akashic’s anthology LAS VEGAS NOIR got a shout-out in a positive Publishers Weekly review today:
Columnist Tod Goldberg’s
“Mitzvah” makes good use of the Las Vegas myth that people come to the
city to bury their past identities and reinvent themselves. His
antihero, mobster Sal Cuperine, has for years posed as Rabbi David
Cohen, managing to handle the demands of the pulpit until the strain of
his charade becomes too much to bear.
IAMTW Member Karen Traviss’ REVELATION, a STAR WARS tie-in, is number one on both the New York Times and the Publishers Weekly mass market paperback bestseller lists. Another tie-in, TOM CLANCY’S ENDWAR by David Michaels (a pseudonym for an IAMTW member) is number nine on the PW list and number ten on the NYT list. Congratulations to them both! This just goes to show that critics may scoff at TV and movie tie-ins, but the public loves them.
I finally saw MICHAEL CLAYTON…it was my test drive using the Amazon Unbox to rent a movie on my TiVo (a service which I liked). If you haven’t seen the movie, you can stop reading now, because I’m going to spoil some things.
I thought George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Sydney Pollack were terrific and some of the dialogue really crackled, but the simple plot was inexplicably and needlessly hard to follow at times and there were some logic flaws that pulled me right out of the movie, ultimately ruining it for me.
The bad guys did a slick and professional job of killing Wilkinson’s character and making it look like a suicide, thus establishing them as formidable opponents. But then they put a car bomb in Clayton’s Mercedes. Why!? Why not stab him in an apparent "mugging gone bad" or run him over as he’s crossing the street? Why kill him in a manner that will draw an enormous amount of attention — the exact opposite of what the bad guys wanted? It was stupid and sloppy writing, made worse when Clayton is able to fool them (and apparently the police) into thinking he’s dead even though there’s no charred corpse in his car… just his wallet and his watch. Did his body get vaporized?
There was also one niggly detail that bugged me, too. At one point they say Clayton was born in 1959. Then, a few scenes later, Clayton says that he’s 45. The math just doesn’t add up (and the movie clearly takes place in 2007, sine he’s driving a brand new SL).
I also don’t get how Tilda Swinton got nominated for an Oscar, much less won the thing, based on her small role…
I published the post below on this blog in July 2006…and forgot all about what I said I’d do at the end. Now I am following through…
Ken Levine writes today about the worst script he and his partner ever wrote.
In 1993 my writing partner, David Isaacs and I did a short run series
for CBS called BIG WAVE DAVE’S starring Adam Arkin and David Morse. It
ran that summer, got 19 shares, kept 100% of MURPHY BROWN’S audience
and was cancelled. At the time CBS had starring vehicles in the wings
for Peter Scolari, Bronson Pinchot, and the always hilarious Faye
Dunaway so they didn’t need us.We were given a production order
of six with three back-up scripts. We assigned the first two back-ups
to our staff and planned on writing the third ourselves. When the show
was cancelled we put in to CBS to get paid for the additional scripts.
They said fine, but we had to turn in the completed scripts. Gulp!
Bill
Rabkin and I had almost the exact same experience on SEAQUEST. We’d
already turned in the outline for episode 14 when we got canceled.
But in order to get paid for the teleplay, we had to write it. We did
it in one day, while we were packing up our office. I still live in
fear that some sf fan will stumble on a bootleg draft at a scifi
convention, post it on the net, and people will think we actually write
that bad. I’m in Germany now, or I’d post an excerpt. I’ll try to
remember to do it when I return.
UPDATE March 8, 2007: Okay, here’s an excerpt from "About Face," the script Bill and I wrote in a day to get our script fee. We knew no one would ever read it. All you need to know to follow along is that Piccolo a man with gills and Darwin is a talking dolphin (I’m not kidding).
Here’s the final front cover of MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY, which comes out in July. It’s virtually the same picture of Monk that’s on the cover of MR. MONK IS MISERABLE but with a different backdrop. (You can click on the photo for a larger image).
Here’s the first version of the dust jacket for MR. MONK IS MISERABLE, which comes out next fall. (You can click on the image for a larger view).
Sorry I haven’t been posting much lately — I’ve been working hard on my seventh MONK book (due April 30th) and a couple of other projects, which hasn’t left me much time for the blog (or The Bog as Paul Guyot used to call it). What’s nice is that now I can call Bill Rabkin and my brother Tod and whine to them about meeting my deadlines. I was doing that before, but now that they are also juggling tie-in writing assignments with their other work, they know first-hand what I am going through. I am looking forward to this summer, when Tod and I will both have new books out and can do signings together, and next January, when Tod, Bill and I will all have books out at the same time. It should be fun… certainly more so than hitting the signing trail alone.
TVShowsonDVD reports that the extras on the MANNIX first season box set will include clips from "Hardboiled Murder," the DIAGNOSIS MURDER episode that Bill Rabkin & I wrote that brought Joe Mannix out of retirement…