#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
How do you download clips from YouTube? I’m a moron and can’t seem to figure it out. Please explain it to me in the comments. Thanks!
And thank you again, William Simon, for hooking me on the video crack. I can’t seem to get enough of all those main title sequences, which I often use as part of my course when I teach TV writing.
In a bid to get more subscribers, Showtime is offering free episodes of DEXTER, L WORD, WEEDS, BROTHERHOOD, and SLEEPER CELL on Yahoo to get you hooked. They are also aggressively courting bloggers like me to get the word out. Obviously, its worked, since here I am, talking about it.But this is not the first time Showtime has tried to reach bloggers and their readers.
Several weeks before DEXTER premiered, Showtime sent bloggers personal emails with links to the pilot in an effort to generate word-of-mouth for the show within the blogosphere. As far as I know, this is the first time a network has so actively attempted to court bloggers to hype their shows. DEXTER scored well in its premiere…it will be interesting to know, if it’s even possible to determine, how much Showtime’s aggressive web push played in those numbers.
My cousin Daniel Barer pointed me to this California State Appeals Court ruling regarding a Santa Barbara Assistant D.A. who showed astonishing bad judgement by writing a self-published novel about a rape case she was in the midst of prosecuting. The Appeals Court threw her off the case.
Here are the opening titles to the ITC series THE ZOO GANG…featuring an instrumental theme by Paul McCartney. YouTube is destroying my life.
Many thanks to William Simon who sent me this link to Gene Barry singing the theme to BURKE’S LAW… accompanied by a slide show of scenes of Gene in action taken from his short-lived 70s show THE ADVENTURER. It’s wonderful. Here are some of my favorite lyrics:
"Hey lover, lets make the scene
I’ve got a crazy high-fi in my limousine"
Birds of a feather
should wing it together
If we are forsaking love
We’re breaking Burke’s Law…"
I’m a TV geek. I kept every copy of TV Guide that came out since I was nine years old. I couldn’t wait for the TV Guide Fall Preview Edition. I used to make a conscious effort to watch (and tape) at least the first episode over every new
drama.
But this summer I gave away all my TV Guides to the Los Angeles County Library. I forgot to buy the TV Guide Fall Preview Edition. And this season, for the first time in my life, I seem to have no interest at all in the new fall shows.
I don’t know whether it’s because I’m too busy or if the shows themselves just aren’t that captivating. Or is it the serialized nature of most of them — and an unwillingness on my part to make the committment? Or perhaps it’s the knowledge that most of the new shows will be cancelled — so why bother? — and I’ll get Emmy DVDs of the ones that survive. Or maybe there are just too many shows on too many networks and not enough hours in the day to watch them all.
The point is, I’m just not watching. And I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
The only new series I’ve seen are SHARK and STUDIO 60. I’ve got a bunch of others clogging my Tivo…but I doubt I’ll get to them before they are deleted to make room for new stuff I won’t watch. But like the rest of America, I’m keeping up on most of the shows I was watching before…like LAW AND ORDER: SVU, BOSTON LEGAL and GREY’S ANATOMY… and I can’t wait to see the new season of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.
So have I changed…or has TV changed?
This isn’t really about Bouchercon, since I skipped Sunday’s program and headed out of Madison at 9 am. In a first for me, I only bought one book at Bouchercon and two in the city (vintage paperbacks by Harry Whittington and Charles Willeford for only $5.50 each!). I was quite pleased with my restraint.
I drove into Milwaukee early, about six hours before my connecting flight to Chicago, so I would have a chance to explore the city. I roamed around mostly on foot and was charmed by the architecture of all the old buildings downtown. I even stumbled on a used bookstore and found some Richard Wheeler and George Gilman westerns I didn’t already have. Even so, I didn’t go crazy and didn’t spend more than $3-a-book. Such restraint.
But then I went out to the Milwaukee airport, where I made a monumental discovery…The Best Airport Bookstore ever. The place is called Renaissance Books…and it’s a used bookstore…in the airport. And best of all, it’s full of vintage paperbacks at super-cheap prices. I went wild. I bought books by Harry Whittington/Whit Harrison, E.L. Doctorow (WELCOME TO HARD TIMES), Peter Rabe, Bart Spicer, Albert Conroy, Vin Packer, Stephen Marlowe, Frederick Manfred, and an IT TAKES A THIEF tie-in by Gil Brewer….at the airport! And only one of the titles, the Doctorow book, was over $7. I could have spent hours there if not for the flight I had to catch to Chicago.
So much for my book-buying restraint at Bouchercon.
This was my last day at Bouchercon… I started the day working on MONK #4, then headed over to the convention hotel for lunch with Steve Hamilton. On the way, I stopped at the street faire to buy some Madison-goodies for my daughter Madison, visited the amazing Capitol building, and chatted with Laura Lippman, Jeff Abbott, Heidi Mack, Lee Child, and John Himes in the hotel lobby. After lunch, I spent some time with Theresa Schwegel, Twist Phelan, Jerrilyn Farmer, and Elaine Viets, among others, before heading back to my hotel to get ready for the dinner party my publisher threw for their authors. The dinner party was great, I got to meet Jonathan King for the first time (and hear his hilarious story about the pedophile with his name in the UK) and eavesdrop on a conversation between an editor and an author about the "hot cowboy sex" in an upcoming novel. It doesn’t get any better than that.
My sisters Karen Dinino and Linda Woods are going to be on THE VIEW in early October to talk about their book VISUAL CHRONICLES.
I didn’t spend a lot of time at the convention today. My morning was eaten up with phone calls on some TV work I’m doing (more on that another day) and work on MONK #4. I met with my publishers Kristen Weber & Ellen Edwards of Penguin/Putnam, author Donald Bain, and his lovely wife Renee for a long lunch, then spent two hours at convention, chatting with Max Allan Collins, J.A. Konrath, Bill Crider (official Bouchercon videographer with his $125 Point-and-Shoot), Thomas Cook, Margaret Maron, Sean Doolittle, Rochelle Krich, Cynthia Chow (voted the hottest librarian in the U.S.), Lita Weissman (the SoCal Borders CRM extraordinaire) Mark Billingham (who professed his undying love of DIAGNOSIS MURDER), Jon Jordan (CRIMESPREE editor and natty dresser), and a bunch of other folks. I bought the anthology THESE GUNS FOR HIRE, signed by many of the contributors, and then it was time to head back to the glamorous Doubletree to make some calls and get dressed up for the Shamus Awards. I sat at what turned out to be the loser table…where fellow nominees PJ Parrish (Kris Montee), Joel Goldman, Harry Hunsicker and I all lost in our respective Shamus categories (I got whipped, as expected, by Michael Connelly’s excellent THE LINCOLN LAWYER). The ceremony included a funny, but far-too-lengthy roast of Private Eye Writers of America founder Robert Randisi (who has written over 300 GUNSMITH novels, among many other books). The comments by Dominick Abel and Jon Lutz were, by far, the highlights of the roast and of the evening’s festivities. Now I am back in my room, working on MONK #4, while the couple in the room next door have loud, moaning, headboard-pounding sex. They must be a very religious couple, since they keep calling out to God.