#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
Emmy-winning writer-producer Ken Levine talks today about the time a cat held him up for a higher salary.
I said as much as we too loved working with Charlie and greatly admired
his many talents, I would hate to stand in the way of his feature
career so I passed on his offer.Unbelievably, we somehow managed to find another gray cat that could sit in a chair.
Bill Crider has put together a slide-show of Harry Whittington’s wonderfully lurid paperback covers. Don’t be fooled by the covers, though — the books aren’t trash. Whittington is one of the best noir writers ever.
You gotta love the hypocrisy and idiocy of fanficcers. It seems the "fanfic community" is in an uproar because some fanficcer stole from another fanficcers work. Author John Scalzi sums up the laughably inane situation nicely:
Let’s remember one fundamental thing about fanfic: Almost all of it
is entirely illegal to begin with. It’s the wild and wanton
misappropriation of copyrighted material (I’m sure there is fanfic that
features public domain characters, just not nearly as much as there is
of, say, Harry Potter fanfic). Copyright holders may choose not to see
it, or may even tacitly encourage it from time to time, but the fact of
the matter is that if you’re writing fanfic, you’re already doing
something legally out of bounds. And, really, if you’re already wantonly violating copyright, what’s a little plagiarism to go along with it? Honestly. In for a penny, in for a pound.I recognize this attitude probably won’t sit well with fanficcers,
but this is really an "honor among thieves" sort of issue, isn’t it? If
you’ve already morally justified intellectual theft so you can play
with Harry and Hermione and Draco and whomever else you want to play
with, I’m not entirely sure how one couldn’t also quite easily justify taking juicy chunks of other people’s text to play with as well.[…]Out in the real world, I take plagiarism rather very seriously, but
then, out in the real world, I take appropriation of copyright
seriously as well. If fanficcers want me to oblige their outrage about
fanfic plagiarism, I suppose I would have to ask how it is essentially
more serious than the appropriation of copyrighted characters and
settings, and how if I must criticize one why I am not also therefore
obliged to criticize the other.
(Thanks to Jim Winter for the heads-up on this).
The Globe (the sleazy tabloid, not the Boston paper) reports that Marlo Thomas is returning as THAT GIRL in a sitcom pilot for ABC. In the revival, she plays a grandmother whose 20-year-old grand-daughter is a struggling actress in New York. This reminds me of the disasterous MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW movie (MARY & RHODA) that ABC did a few years back, which focused on the original sitcom stars’ daughters and their laughless struggles. The tabloid also reports that all the actresses, from Farrah Fawcett to Tanya Roberts, whot starred in CHARLIES ANGELS are reuniting for an ABC TV movie.
Television Chronicles was a magazine made for TV geeks like me. It was chock full of interviews and episode guides on classic and not-so-class TV series. Sadly, the magazine disappeared from news stands a few years back. But I am very pleased to report that Television Chronicles has returned as an online magazine. The current issue has an indepth look at the making and demise of the Bill Bixby series THE MAGICIAN.
It seems like everybody is apologizing lately for not keeping up their blogs. Author Duane Swierczynski, for instance, blames the book he’s working on and Tess Gerritsen blames the beautiful Maine weather. Me, I’m just brain dead. I finished my 8th DIAGNOSIS MURDER novel last week and it feels lke my brain has been wrung out and left dry of any ideas, even for a blog post. So, in lieu of coming up with anything clever for my blog today, I’ll steal some cleverness from others.
My brother Tod found a novel way of dealing with some hate mail, Ken Levine has some good advice for industry outsiders with pilot ideas, and it’s nice to see one of my favorite authors, Daniel Woodrell, is finally getting some attention (my friend Denise Hamilton also gave his latest book a rave in Sunday’s LA Times Book Review).
Michael Bracken was kind enough to alert me that there’s a full-page interview with me in the September issue of The Writer magazine. I did the interview so long ago that it completed slipped my mind. I haven’t read it yet, so please let me know if I come off like a brilliantly clever fellow or a complete moron.
I have no idea what MySpace is or how to use it or why I should be part of it… but I have bowed to peer pressure and I am there with a cross-posting of this blog. Please be my friend, whatever the heck that means in MySpaceSpeak…
Newsweek reports that publishing legend Jason Epstein is one of the backers behind the Espresso Book Machine, a new device that can print-out a bound book in minutes for "a penny a page." A 300 page book can be produced in just three minutes.
Imagine if there were a magic machine that could print entire books in
mere minutes. You could go to a bookstore or coffee shop, choose a book
online from millions of digital titles and then—poof!—out would come a
fully bound book. You could get rare and out-of-print titles, in any
language, and for less because the inventory isn’t stored on site.
The machine is now being tested at the World Bank Bookstore in Washington D.C.
The Kansas City Star and the AP reported today about an innovative new film-making program at Stephens College in Missouri that my writing partner Bill Rabkin is actively involved in as an instructor. The students learned by doing — they worked as the crew on an hour-long pilot directed by Bill and written by Ken LaZebnik, who is also dean of the School of Performing Arts at the Stephens College.
Director Bill Rabkin, whose credits include a stint as director and
executive producer of "Diagnosis Murder," called the student crew
members eager to learn and overwhelmingly positive – even in the face
of lunches on 16-hour days that often consisted of bologna and cheese
sandwiches on white bread.For LaZebnik, who co-wrote the "Prairie Home Companion Movie" with
Garrison Keillor, the film camp is more than just a teaching exercise.
He hopes to shop "Triangle" – his story of a family struggling to cope
with the death of a 6-year-old child while adopting a new daughter from
China – to studios as well as regional film festivals."This is an educational experience. But it’s also for real," he said.