My Blog

Bochco Blues

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Ygp682c If anyone needed proof that ageism rages in Hollywood, all you need to do is look at Steven Bochco.  According to a story in yesterday’s LA Times, he’s having a hard time getting shows on the air these days…or even getting his pilots shot.

By his own admission, he can be a difficult to work with…citing his clashes with ABC after they hired him to "save" COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF after creator/showrunner Rod Lurie was booted:

"Oh yeah, they wanted me out. They couldn’t stand me. It did a great deal of damage, probably, to my relationship with that network. It was not fun."

But there are lots of producers who are a pain-in-the-ass, clash with executives, and don’t have 1/10th of his talent or his accolades…and the networks still line up to business with them (we ALL know who they are).  The LA Times story suggests that its because Bochco has fallen out-of-step with what the networks are looking for these days:

Bochco is a reality-based drama producer in a business now crawling with "high-concept" fantasists who draw their inspiration from comic books. "You’re looking at 400-year-old cops and detectives who are vampires. . . . It’s fine. I don’t have any disdain for it. It’s just not what I do."

I don’t buy that. It’s not like his brand of story-telling has fallen out of favor. THE SHIELD, THE SOPRANOS, NIP/TUCK, THE WIRE and scores of other ‘gritty’ and ‘envellope-pushing’ shows owe an enormous debt to Bochco, who broke new ground with HILL STREET BLUES and NYPD BLUE (Bochco did try, disasterously, to jump on the high-concept bandwagon with BLIND JUSTICE, a show that started out as a joke in his novel DEATH BY HOLLYWOOD). I think the truth behind Bochco’s slump lies in this observation:

The network executives stay the same age and I keep getting older, and it creates a different kind of relationship. When I was doing my stuff at NBC with Brandon [Tartikoff] and ‘Hill Street,’ we were contemporaries. . . . When I sit down with [the current network bosses], they’re sitting in a room with someone who’s old enough to be their father. My kids are their age. That’s a different reality, and I’m not sure they want to sit in a room with their fathers."

I’ll have a chance to chat with Bochco about it. We’re both guests next month at the Cologne Conference.

(The photo above is from an MWA event…pictured are Bob Levinson, William Link, Bochco and yours truly)

Traveling Man

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I am off to Montreal tomorrow to meet with Canadian broadcasters and to record the ADR for one of our FAST TRACK stars…and then I’m going to Berlin, Munich and Cologne for more post-production on FAST TRACK and some important meetings on other projects. I won’t be back until Sept 8…but I will try to post here from the road.

Spare Change

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That’s exactly what this book feels like…Robert B. Parker’s spare change, the nearly worthless stuff in his pocket that gets tossed in a jar and forgotten.

Sunny Randall is usually Parker on aut0-pilot…and SPARE CHANGE is no exception, except that it may set a new low for him (something I thought the last Sunny book did). In this book, Sunny goes after a run-of-the-mill serial killer. Parker doesn’t have a fresh take on the subject, the investigation is dull and Sunny, and all the cops around her, behave like imbeciles. The climax is predictable, perfunctory, and makes Sunny unbelievably stupid. As if that wasn’t disappointing enough, Parker tacks on a totally unnecessary and laughably ridiculous "Irving-the-Explainer" at the end. Did he mean it to be funny? I don’t think so.

It’s a truly terrible book. It has none of Parker’s snappy dialogue…it reads more like someone trying to imitate Parker rather than something by Parker himself. If Parker’s name wasn’t on it, I doubt it would be the bestseller that it’s bound to be.

Actually, this feels like a half-assed Spenser, only without Spenser and Hawk. All of Spenser’s other regulars are on stage — Belson, Quirk, Healy, even the irritating Susan Silverman. Spenser isn’t around to moon over Susan, so Sunny does it for him. She even rambles on and on and on about her dog, the way Spenser does.

I’ve completely run out of patience with Parker’s fascination with his heroes and their relationship with their dogs. Spenser, Stone, and Sunny all have dogs that they treat like their children and spend endless amounts of time (and pages) thinking about and talking about.

Any time Parker starts talking about the dogs, I skip pages…something I rarely do when reading a book. But if you skip all the yammering about dogs, that only leaves about 20,000 words of story, so the book goes by pretty fast.

This makes the third or fourth Parker stinker in a row…so I’m asking myself why I keep bothering to buy, and read, Parker’s books. Is it my affection for his early work? For the impact he’s had on my writing and my career (my first two script sales were to SPENSER FOR HIRE). Usually when I get to this point, he surprises me by coming out with a great novel — an APPALOOSA or a DOUBLE PLAY or an early Stone — and wins me over anew.  Because when Parker is in top form, he’s terrific. I guess that’s what keeps me buying.

I hope the next Parker book is that great one… it’s long overdue.

UPDATE: It turns out I’m not the only disappointed Parker fan who decided to blog about SPARE CHANGE today…so did my buddy Bill Crider.

I can’t resist sharing a SPOILER after the jump:

Read more

Conference Kurfluffle

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Left Coast Crime, and some other mystery conventions, have chosen not to place authors on panels unless their books are from companies on the MWA’s list of approved publishers. So now a handful of irate POD and self-published authors are running around blogs and message boards saying the MWA is responsible for this new policy.

The MWA has nothing to do with how conferences organize their panels or how bookstores stock their shelves or how reviewers choose the books that they review. Nobody in the MWA has ever suggested to any conference chair, book reviewer, book seller, or anyone else that they use the organization’s list of approved publishers as their guide. They are making the decision on their own.

Speaking for myself, the fact that other writers organizations (like the Romance Writers of America) and major writers conferences are following our lead only underscores the necessity and sensibility of the basic, professional standards that the MWA has set…and the good that it is doing for our members and the industry. I hope as a result that authors will be more careful about the publishers that they do business with…and that more publishers will hold themselves to higher ethical and professional standards in the way they treat their authors and conduct their business.

Let’s Put On a Show

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Nikki Finke reports that "High School Musical 2" broke just about every record there is for a made-for-cable movie. For one thing, it was the most-watched cable program AND the most watched basic cable movie of all time. That alone would be remarkable enough, but with 17 million viewers, it ranked as  the most-viewed Friday program, cable or broadcast, in the past five years. As Nikki says:

Just shows that TV viewers will respond to good, clean, energetic fun. Not everything has to be edgy.

How many networks do you think will take that message from the numbers? None. What we will see are a lot more teenage musicals.

A Writer in Retreat

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Author Sandra Scoppettone is having a dry spell or, worse,  is going through a bitter, creative depression. Either way, she’s candidly chronicling it on her blog. On June 20th, she wrote, in part:

How long has it been? I don’t know. It seems like months. It is months? Huh. Actually it seems more like a day. That’s how much I’m enjoying it. It being not writing.

On June 23rd, she wrote, in part:

I hear about the new upcoming writers and I read them.  Some are damn good.  I wish I could be part of them, in their grade, their class, so to speak.  But it’s no longer my time. That’s okay.  I had my chance.  Now, despite my wishes, which, by the way, are for the forty year old me, I don’t have any idea if I’ll publish again.  Or write again.  I’m inclined to think I’ll write, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be published. That’s not okay.  But there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

On July 21st, she wrote, in part:

I’ve been reading a lot and I have thoughts about the books I read, but this blog was meant to be about writing thoughts, as it says above.  The problem is I have no writing thoughts. […]Here’s the thing: I don’t miss writing at all.  I have no idea how long that will last.  Maybe forever.  Maybe until Labor Day. […] I know I’ve posted about publishing before.  So what more is there to say?  We all know it’s only going to get worse.

On August 3rd, she had a one-line post:

The title for the book I might write just came to me.

And then, four days later,  another one-line post:

I now hate the title.

On August 12th, she wrote:

Why am thinking about writing this book that I’ve had in the back of my mind for a few months?  What do I know about the things I’d have to include?  Who would be interested in this? 

I’ve said to myself and maybe here that I would probably start after Labor Day.  That’s 21 days away.  On Labor Day I’d be facing writing the next day. When I think of that it makes me sick.

If I start in September and don’t have interuptions (this has never happened) it’ll take me four to six months to complete a first draft.  And another one or two to rewrite.

And then what?  Give it to my agent?  She’ll hate it.  So maybe I’ll have to find another agent.  Not easy.  Or maybe my agent will decide to try and sell it.

Nobody will buy it.  Or even if somebody does it will fall through the cracks and three people will read it.

Why bother?

I’m going back to bed.

I find her posts disturbing and sad…especially since her blog used to be filled with such enthusiasm for writing. It’s unpleasant to see her in such a self-defeating, bitter retreat. And I’m not so sure it’s healthy for her career to be posting about it on her blog…then again, that’s probably exactly why she’s doing it. I hope she snaps out of her writing funk soon.

UPDATE: In addition to commenting here to this post, Sandra has also blogged about it.

Signing On and Signing Off

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Yesterday, I had a booksigning for MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS and DIAGNOSIS MURDER: THE LAST WORD at Mysteries to Die For in Thousand Oaks. It was the first formal signing I have done in eight months and I had a great time. The crowd was big and enthusiastic and there was a lot of laughter. I’m looking forward to my signing next Saturday at the Mystery Book Store in Westwood. But those are the only signings I have set up and I am not rushing to schedule any more.

In a way, it was probably a good thing that I took an unintentional signing hiatus, thanks to my travel committements overseas for FAST TRACK. Since about 2003, I’ve had about four new books out a year and I was doing a LOT of booksignings. I was signing too much…the events were becoming less special for me and for readers.

I also took an unplanned year off from conventions, missing Bouchercon, Thrillerfest, Left Coast Crime and Men of Mystery (I’m also missing Bouchercon next month), even though I had new books out to promote. I think that turned out to be a good thing for me, since you can become such a familiar face and frequent participant on panels that it diminishes the impact you have…it actually becomes counter-productive. There are some authors who are at every convention and do the same panels over and over and over…to the point that most readers probably know their advice and anecdotes by heart. I don’t want to become one of those  authors ("Oh God, not Lee again. Do we have to hear that Ian Ludlow story for the 112th time?"), though I fear that I already have.

For another thing, a big signing schedule and a lot of convention travel just isn’t cost-effective for me. It might be on a stand-alone original novel, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense with the lower royalty percentages I get on my tie-in work. And with all the international travel I have been doing lately for my TV work, I’m not eager to jump on a plane again to attend a convention as soon as I get home.

The next convention that I will definitely be attending, and am eagerly looking forward to, is Left Coast Crime 2009 in Hawaii…but I don’t know if I will be attending any before that. We’ll see.